Page One Search Engine Overlap Less Than 3%

[Brett_Tabke]

A fascinating pdf by DogPile on search engine overlap:

[missingpieces.dogpile.com...]

The study offers compelling evidence that contradicts the widely held notion that search engines are more or less alike and that searching one engine is the same as searching them all.

(or 3%)
were returned on the fi rst page of all three Web search engines for any one query. This small degree of overlap shows that the leading engines very rarely agree on what results to return on the fi rst page for any given search term.

[missingpieces.dogpile.com...]

[grandpa]

That's an interesting bit of promo for Dogpile.

For a term that ranks me #1 with Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and who knows where in Jeeves, Dogpile still can't get me on the first page ;)

All I'm left with is this - I know that everyone can't be number 1 or even in the top 100. There are too many players in the game for that. In my opinion it comes down to SEO. Completely irrelevant sites can and do rise to the top thru various SEO tactics. Relevant sites with poor SEO (for any given engine) will never rise to the top (of that engine).

Is there any particular reason that MSN was omitted from the research?

[Pedent]

This seems right; I still notice massive differences between the search engines for the kind of terms that interest me (as a surfer). For those terms, SEs other than Google are frequently very disappointing, though Yahoo is sometimes okay. MSN has a long way to go.

[SEOMike]

Their tool is an interesting violation of the "No automated querys" policy of search engines... Wonder if Google will block them haha

[martinibuster]

I wonder what the overlap looks like on money keywords. Because there's more competition on money phrases it's not unusual to similar sites in all three engines.

The random search queries are probably, imo, accounting for the differences reported by dogpile...

[COlarry]

What a hoot! Ironical that DP weighs in on this topic, since its first 15 -20 results depends solely on the depth of advertisers' pocketbooks.