blogonawire

Right after I posted The New Search Engine on The Block (Jun 28, 2008) we had our weekly media meeting and were instantly side tracked into a debate over which search engine is the best. Andrew, our media director, took control and suggested we conduct a completely scientific and unbiased poll to decide the winner – in other words we went around the room and voted. We compared Google, Yahoo!, MSN (Live), Ask, Cuil, Mahalo and Snap using a gamut of difficult and exhaustive tests – namely two keyword searches.

The first test was searching for a generic term: “Jeans.” We did the same search in each engine and analyzed the results. We judged on the way it looked – most of us like when there are pictures of the site or product. We also talked about how relevant the results were. eBay and brand name listings were good, random pictures of people in jeans, not as good. The next search was for a long tail phrase – some of the guys came up with “501 acid wash jeans.”(Personally I think all this talk about OC Style Week is starting to rub off on them.) Anyways, then we judged the results on the same things – this time we noticed if there were listings that lead to a page where that product could actually be purchased, such as Google’s shopping results.

After all this testing we can say with 100% certainty that 25% of Sitewire feels that the search engines are ranked as follows:

7. Snap – it’s a really fun engine, we like how you can roll over results and see the page, even bookmark it. But some of the results weren’t that relevant and that’s the real point of a search engine right?

6. Live – It’s pretty plain, there aren’t any exciting features or cool additions and the results aren’t nearly as relevant as some of the other major league engines

5. Yahoo! – I think this engine fell so far down the list because we’re just so used to it. It doesn’t have anything attention grabbing and it’s also not the best results. We did like the drop down menu of additional search ideas but most of the engines are doing that now too.

4. Ask – everyone liked that you could roll over the site and see a picture, as well as see major stats for the site. This might be because we’re all such internet media geeks but seeing how many visitors a site got without having to do any research won Ask some major points.

3. Mahalo – This site is actually really cool. It lets users create custom pages for searches with top 10 pages, buying guides, popular brands, retailers, bargains…the list goes on! And that was a little annoying, you could scroll for a while through all this content and it seemed a little busy on the page. But another great feature is that you can click through tabs on the site and see results for all the other major search engines as well as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and Flickr.

2. Cuil – maybe just because it’s new but we were all pretty excited about this engine. The layout is really nice and the categories and tabs make it easy to narrow your search. The results are pretty relevant and the pictures are right there besides the listing. A few more technology updates and this could become the next big thing.

1. Google – Big surprise. But we all still swear by the master of all search engines. Google’s shopping results were right on every time, it had relevant results and even corrects our spelling when we mess up. With as much time as we spend using it, talking about it, optimizing for it and managing campaigns in it – it’s almost like an old friend. Or ok, maybe not, but it’s still our favorite engine.

So there you have it. Results don’t get more conclusive than that.