Search Engine Overlap Growing Smaller

A new study has just come out to remind people why it is important not to put all their search eggs in one basket and use more than one Internet search engine.

The search engine Dogpile, in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University, compared the results on Google, Ask, Yahoo and Microsoft for a large number of random searches.

Dogpile had conducted a similar study in 2005, when it found that "84.9 percent of results on search engines were unique to one engine and not found on competitor sites," according to an article on the site Search Engine Land. In 2007, there is "further divergence and even less overlap: only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same across the engines".

Earlier Library Boy posts about the uniqueness of search engines and their results include:

• Dogpile Metasearch Displays Results Overlap (March 16, 2005): "By comparing results side-by-side, it quickly becomes apparent that each search engine has its own unique view of the web. If you rely on a single source for search results, you're often missing a significant chunk of the web..."
• Search Engine Overlap Even Smaller Than Assumed (August 9, 2005): "The implications of these findings are significant for both searchers and marketers. Searchers relying on a single search engine are missing a vast swath of web content that they could easily find simply by trying their queries on other engines... Effectively, for more than two-thirds of all queries, each search engine is likely to give you completely different results."