Search Engines Compared

There is plenty of talk these days about search engines. At least there is plenty of 'webchatter' for want of a more appropriate term. Whether on web pages, in forums (yes, I know the word is technically fora, but so few people seem to use the correct word these days 'forums' has grown to be at least equally correct), in ezines or newsletters, or wherever else, such 'noise' is everywhere.

I won't begin to attempt a summary here, that would be far too large an undertaking. Nor will I attempt to address the key themes. What I will do is to present a simple case study. Actually 'case study' sounds a bit grand for this, but that term will do for now.

I will use Herb-Health-Guide.com as the case in point. This is a site of mine that is quite new. I haven't done any aggressive promotion of the site. A couple of weeks or so ago I did submit the domain to about a half-dozen minor search engines and directories (I hope that doesn't offend anyone!). Prior to that, it had an inbound link from Education4Skills.com and one from Healthy-Vitamin-Choice.com, which had itself only been set up about a month before the Herb Health Guide site.

I did apply for DMOZ inclusion but that has fallen into the 'backlog' abbyss and nothing has happened with it as far as I know. In any event, the site is only a couple of months old (in terms of actually having any content published) so nothing can be expected from this overworked and understaffed directory at this time.

So what is the Herb Health Guide site like? I'm naturally biased, so you should go and see for yourself, but I'd say it is one of the best sites on the web for broadly accessible, quality health education pertaining to herbs. It is fully W3C compliant XHTML and has clear navigation and a clean, crisp look and feel. It recently added some dynamic content that updates three pages daily and 7 pages have randomly posted clinical case studies on each page load, to keep their content fresh and interesting.

Lets get to that search engine comparison then shall we. As of today, Thursday September 8, 2005 the following search engine listing results were found. I should point out that these were obtained using the SearchStatus 1.8 plugin by Craig Raw for Firefox 1.0.6 which executes the "site:herb-health-guide.com" query on the three major search engines.

The Results

Google contained 20 pages (Returned in 0.09 seconds)
MSN contained 80 pages (Returned in 0.1 seconds)
Yahoo! Search contained 141 pages (Returned in 0.31 seconds)

The differences are significant. The clear winner is Yahoo and the clear loser is Google.

Not only is Google far more cluttered with garbage sites than its competitors, it seems to be far slower and far less thorough when it comes to indexing quality informational sites. Increasingly Google is suffering from the many problems associated with its success, or so it would seem.

I have been a keen user and supporter of Google since its original appearance on the web, years ago while still teaching in the university sector. The big G's growth and development are quite astonishing. Now though, they face far bigger problems and issues and they no longer enjoy some of the ingredients that secured their past success. They do seem to regularly 'pull a rabbit out of a hat' and they will continue to need some magic if they hope to lay claim to being the premier search provider.

For now I am happy to be so well represented in the majors. All of them.