Is bigger better? Are they smarter?

[netcommr]

When asked the other day about a certain topic while building a plan for a new strategy. I did not know the answer, so where do you think I went. Straight to an engine to look it up for me, thinking this would be an easy answer for them. My usual first stop is Google, but they let me down afer a few tries of different combinations of queries. So, since this was a research type of question I tried Northern Light, same result but found something close which turned out to be inaccurate.(not NL's error) Today I spent some time testing the new technologies like Wisenut and Teoma, same result. I have never really liked Inktomi that much because they get spammed out so much, but they surprized me. They may have the smallest DB, but they found my answer (#1 result).

Is a bigger DB and relying so much on links really going to be that acurate in the future? Not always!! This post is by no means supposed to say which search service is better or more accurate. It just reminded me of the fact that there will never be a perfect engine and we need to have the option of many different types of search services to keep diversity for different types of queries.

Google
wo - top 50 - not found
w - 0 results

Wisenut
wo - top 50 - not found
w - 0 results

AlltheWeb
wo - top 50 - not found
w - 0 results

Teoma
wo - top 50 - not found
w - top 3 - not found

Altavista
wo - top 50 - not found
w - 0 results

Northern Light
wo - top 50 - not found
w - top 50 - not found

Excite
wo - top 50 - not found
w - 0 results

Ask Jeeves
nothing related returned

About
wo - top 6 - not found
w - 0 results

Ah-Ha
w/wo - not found on eBay

Directories - Yahoo,Dmoz,Looksmart
Browsing 1/2 hour each - not found
Searching - 0 results from their DB

Inktomi eng. AOL,MSN,Hotbot,NBCi,iWEB
wo - result 1 & 3 found answer
w - 0 results

Accuracy of the results returned for this query
Inktomi
Wisenut
Teoma
Northern Light
About
Google
Altavista
Excite
Ah-Ha
Ask

query: average age of webmasters
answer: 28 - 30

.

[Brett_Tabke]

Should have put Fast in there. I think they are doing a pretty good job with relevancy. I'm not always sold on Google either. It's so .corp heavy in places. The big magazine and article sites tend to dominate Google. The problem is those sites are all news related. When you are search for specific info, those news outlets generally don't link to other information that you are really looking for.

The classic case is that of searching for info about a new motherboard I had. There were 20 stories about the motherboard on computer magazine sites and the rest of the top 100 was dominated by sales locations. I didn't need to know the motherboard was released, or who sold it. I needed to know what the jumper setting were for a specific card. Even the manufactuer didn't have the info on thier site. It took a half hour of searching through Google until I gave up and went to another engine and found the right site in the top five.

I've run into that scenario time and time agine with different engines. Half the battle is knowing which engine is good at which type of query.

[netcommr]

opps. for got them at the bottom

Accuracy of the results returned for this query
Inktomi
Wisenut
Teoma
AlltheWeb
Northern Light
About
Google
Altavista
Excite
Ah-Ha
Ask

-------------

Brett, just found that sticky mail thing. It was driving me crazy thinking WMW was starting a new slang term for email... ha ha Great little feature, luv it. Now just to get myself in the habit of checking it.

[mivox]

You don't need to "check" SitckyMail, per se... You'll see a little note next to the StickyMail link that says "You have mail: [X]" Where X is the number of messages in your inbox...

I must say, your search results puzzle me... I've been using Google almost exclusively for any html/text searches I've got for quite some time, and rarely have trouble finding what I need. Inktomi, OTOH, was relegated to the "barely useful" pile a long time ago... Must have been some obscure search terms!