Major Search Engines; a comparison

How to get the best out of the Internet.

Since the last time that I wrote this article there have been a great many changes with the major search engines and what they can do. This provides a comparison of major engines. Previous versions of this article have included various different search engines, and this continues to be the case here; I add and drop search engines as they come into or go out of fashion. The previous version included AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Lycos. I decided to drop the latter two, since they have (in my opinion) pretty much dropped off the scale, but I kept AltaVista, mainly because I still like it and will use it now and then. I have included Exalead and Icerocket as new engines; mainly because they are ones that I will use, and I've also put Yahoo! and MSN Search in as well, since they are increasing in importance.

Things to remember when searching using these engines.

If you are used to online database searching, or using CD-ROM products, you'll find that these engines are an annoying mix of the very skillful and the very primative. Altavista will, for example, search through a very large database in a matter of a few seconds, and while it is reasonably sophisticated does not stand up well in comparison to some of the advanced features offered by CD-ROM publishers.
Don't forget that there is more to searching the Internet than just looking at WWW pages. An increasing number of search engines will allow you to use their facilities to search newsgroups, or perhaps people's email addresses.
The databases which the search engines use may well be out of date; new material may have been added, other material may have been deleted. You will only discover this when you actually click to go to a particular site.
If you don't find what you want from one, try using another.
Use a variety of different engines, appropriate to your needs. If for example you just want information on UK or European resources, it makes more sense to go to a search engine which focuses on that region, rather than use a search engine which is global in approach.
There are a great many search engines, but for a list of those which I find particularly useful, please visit my Search Engines page.

Search engines - a tabular comparison.

	Altavista	Exalead	Google	Icerocket	MSN Search	Teoma	Wisenut	Yahoo!
WWW	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Usenet	NO	NO	YES (Google groups)	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Word in URL	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	NO	YES
Languages?	All or English	38	35	NO	38	10	25	37
Image search?	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES
News?	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES
Multimedia?	YES	NO	Separate function	YES	NO	NO	NO	YES
Limit by file format?	YES (6)	YES (8)	YES (6)	NO	YES (7)	NO	NO	YES (7)
Boolean	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Proximity	NO	YES up to 16 words	YES (Using *)	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Wildcards (three * mice)	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Search in Domain	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES
Search in Title	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	NO	YES
Capitalisation?	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
	Altavista	Exalead	Google	Icerocket	MSN Search	Teoma	Wisenut
Truncation (librar*)	NO	YES	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	YES
Sort Results?	NO	YES (oldest/newest)	NO	NO	YES (date, popularity, exactness)	NO	NO	NO
Preview Doc. size	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Date doc updated	NO	YES	YES	NO	Variable	NO	NO	NO
Search in results	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Group results?	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES	NO
Index size given?	NO	YES 2,027,698,928	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Personalised?	NO	YES	YES	YES (search history)	NO	NO	NO	YES
Geographic Specific?	NO	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	NO	YES
Search weblogs option?	NO	NO	Seperate function	YES	NO	NO	NO	Seperate function
Thumbnails?	NO	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Limit by date?	YES (excellent)	YES (good)	YES (poor)	NO	NO	YES (excellent)	NO	YES (poor)
"Phil Bradley"	133,000 (3rd)	2,729 (7th)	93,100 (4th)	92,900 (5th)	482,554 (1st)	14,600 (6th)	2,164 (8th)	144,000 (2nd)
Everton	12,200,000 (2nd)	5,240,000 (3rd)	688,000 (7th)	5,040,000 (4th)	1,147,801 (6th)	1,748,00(5th)	138,390 (8th)	13,000,000 (1st)
Internet	2,900,000,000 (1st)	160,139,089 (7th)	2,470,000,000 (3rd)	2,147,483,647 (4th)	563,280,393 (5th)	416,770,000 (6th)	34,112,115 (8th)	2,890,000,000 (2nd)

This chart was current at 20th October 2005 You are encouraged to check the various search engines yourself to ensure the validity of the data. Please email me any updated information to include!

Search Engine features

I have tried to mention as many different features as possible, and I hope that they're obvious. However, I've also added below an explanation of them.

WWW
- Does the search engine search the web? Obviously they all do, so this was just for completeness sake
USENET
- USENET or newsgroups. An important and often overlooked element. You can often find very useful stuff that people are writing about in a newgroup that you can't get elsewhere.
Word in URL
- Can you limit your search to a word in the URL? Such as www.mysite.com/library/books.htm It's useful to focus on sites that have, for example 'library' in the URL, because you can be fairly sure that those pages will cover that subject.
Languages
- Fairly obvious option really
Image search
- Again, fairly obvious
News
- Once more, pretty obvious
Multimedia
- This includes sound files, audio files or video. Some engines have a different section or an entirely different engine for this purpose
File format
- It's important to be able to limit by file format to narrow a search even further. More details on searching by file format on my site.
Boolean searching
- AND OR NOT
Proximity
- Can you search on words that are close to each other?
Wildcards
- Can you search for terms with other words in between? Similar to proximity, and this is the route that most engines are taking.
Search in domain
- It's really important to be able to search in a particular domain, as a good way of being able to focus your searches
Search in title
- Similar to searching in a URL
Capitalisation
- Unfortunately none of the main search engines are currently doing this, and I think it's a real mistake. It would be a very important tool - AltaVista used to do it, but stopped.
Truncation
- A good way to broaden a search.Sadly, not well or widely implimented.
Sort Results
- Once you've got your results, the ability to resort on something other than relevance is important. This is slowly happening, at long last!
Preview document size
- Not terribly important, but it's easy to do and useful to see.
Search in results
- Easy to do, but few search engines offer this.
Group results
- Clustering is something that many multi search engines offer, and should be more widely available.
Index size
- Less and less important these days - if you get what you want on the first page, who cares about the x million other results?
Personalised
- More and more engines are offering this, and it's an absolute must.
Geographic specific
- Searching within a country is important, and not just by limiting to a country domain. Regional searching is also a real need.
Search weblogs
- Crucial to being able to find the latest news, comment and opinion.
Thumbnails
- Want to see the page before you go there?
Limit by date
- Again, really important way of limiting search results

The league table

Having compared the different search engines I thought it might be a bit of fun to rank them. This is very unscientific (I mainly added up the Yes's and took account of updating and the size of the database), but I think its reasonably accurate and reflects my own experiences. So, for what its worth, here's the league table, with points assigned to give you an indication of how they match up. It's not really a fair test, but was interesting, at least to me!

Exalead	23 points	Excellent all round search engine that does very well in almost every single category
Yahoo!	21 points	Another great engine, let down slightly by its display of results
AltaVista	18 points	It might be old, but it can still do the business
Google	16 points	Surprisingly poor result, losing out because of it's inflexibility
MSN Search	16 points	Getting there, but still has a way to go
Teoma	9 points	Let down by its limited search options
Icerocket	7 points	Better at searching blogs than the web
Wisenut	1 point	Good for categories, very little else

If you're interested, you can compare the current ranking with the previous version of this article written in 2003, 2001 or even a few years before that!.

Multi-search engines.

Now you've had a chance to look at some single search engines, you might want to have a look at some multi-search engines by going to http://www.philb.com/msengine.htm

Back to Phil Bradley's home page.