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BBC Magazine's Search-Engine Shootout 187

Posted by timothy from the asanine-suggestions-from-jeeves-the-idiot-butler dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On BBC Online's excellent Magazine, there is a shootout between Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. Search tests were conducted on five criteria: an obscure fact; multiple meanings of "raleigh"; speed; and current time in Sydney. Yahoo! is the fastest of the lot. Google has the cleanest interface. MSN Search fared worst of all. Jeeves is the apparent winner for features like related search. (Author claims to be a Google nut.)" This may be the nicest thing anyone's ever said about Jeeves.
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BBC Magazine's Search-Engine Shootout More

BBC Magazine's Search-Engine Shootout

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  • How long until relevance engines are commodities? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:27PM (#10808005)
    Within the next two years max. That spells trouble for Google and its shareholders, who still place a very high premium on what is quickly becoming a common service. Fortunately for Google insiders, they should be able to cash out long before the regular dopes in investorland figure this out.
  • and want karma, just steal it from the previous thread [slashdot.org] which discusses this article.

    oops--cynical mode off. If you are interested in the article, please seach through the above thread for other interesting comments & so that your own comments can be even more interesting or insightful

  • No Teoma =( (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mg2 ( 823681 )
    Granted Teoma [teoma.com] is operated by AskJeeves, but it's hardly the same engine, but it's too bad that they left it out. I think it's one of the better searches out there -- it tops MSN's new search, easily.

  • Interface (Score:2, Informative)

    by Poromenos1 ( 830658 )
    The most important thing for me is a clean interface, and thus I don't care much if Yahoo is faster. Just compare hotmail with gmail, hotmail is like a newspaper. I just want to read my email! I hope MSN search doesn't load thousands of images to display your query.

    • Re:Interface (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:51PM (#10808122) Homepage
      I think you may be confusing Yahoo! the web portal [yahoo.com] with Yahoo! the search engine. [yahoo.com]. As you can see, Yahoo!'s search page is as clean if not cleaner than Google's.
      • Ah, I haven't used Yahoo in a long time, and when I did, I always went to www.yahoo.com. Maybe it should be the other way around, with the portal being at portal.yahoo.com :P
      • That website was news to me. Never occurred to me to enter that URL, and I probably never will (I clicked on it this time). The URL is too long for something as routine as a search. Besides it looks too much like a clone.

        • Re:Interface (Score:3, Insightful)

          by X ( 1235 )
          Sadly, Yahoo!'s been promoting the heck out of searech.yahoo.com, but still you aren't aware of it. Who types in their search engine anyway? You just bookmark it, use the search box in firefox, or use a search toolbar in your browser.

          You'd be well advised to keep Yahoo!'s engine in your arsenal. They actually have a number of nice features. There's the "Also try" stuff, but in particular their image search and product search is *way* better than the competition.
          • That's just it, I don't even need a Google bookmark. Safari comes with a google box on the address bar, and if I'd rather not type at all, I can highlight text with my mouse and use the right button to Google on it. Maybe I shouldn't let Apple think for me, but they do a better job than Microsoft does for its customers.
      • Unfortunately this appears to have been a mistake made by the reviewer as well. :-(
      • As you can see, Yahoo!'s search page is as clean if not cleaner than Google's.

        Whoa! That interface is very blatantly stolen, this looks possibly actionable.


      • Actually, I promote my site's Google search results for "piping design" (without the quotes, and admittedly it's a kind of obscure subject) but the Yahoo results are preferable than the Google ones in my opinion. I'm still #1 at both, but Yahoo finds original content provided by readers at #4 while Google seems to find my advertising page at #2.

  • I smell a conspiracy... (Score:3, Funny)

    by vudufixit ( 581911 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:37PM (#10808054)
    I find it highly suspicious that Incredifind and Lycos Sidesearch were left out. I mean, c'mon, search "helpers" that install themselves automatically and lead me to fascinating products I never knew I needed deserve some mention, right???

  • Something I can say about Jeeves.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by th3space ( 531154 ) <brad@@@bradfucious...com> on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:39PM (#10808064) Homepage
    It helped me track down a couple of old friends, even when all others had failed. To be fair, it was the last one that I had turned to - I'd even tried dogpile and lycos before that.
  • This is hardly fair as MSN search is in very early beta while Google and the rest have been around for several years
    • No... no it's not. MSN search has been around while (admittedly snaffling results from Yahoo), but MSN have had experience in this field before.
    • Beta for how long now???

      MSN search was around for a very long time and every time I tried it it sucked, missed or both.

      Or do you think only new MSN search should be taken in question. That would be wrong because I think that old search was a template for new one. In any case old MSN search should be treated as time of presence in the market.
    • This is hardly fair as MSN search is in very early beta while Google and the rest have been around for several years

      I started using Google when it said 'beta' on its front page - I used it because it frequently gave far better results than all the other search engines of the time.

      I've got a Gmail account. That's 'beta' too. I use that for webmail because I find it's better than all the competitors.

      I can accept glitches and unexpected behaviour in a beta product, as long as the benefits outweigh the prob

  • Google - category sorting could help. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Japong ( 793982 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:42PM (#10808080)

    If I recall correctly, Google does a lot of its indexing and listings by how many web pages link to the page in question, the more popular the page, the closer it is to being first in relevance of a search.

    I've found this to be quite troublesome when it comes to searches for information that instead give me commercial sites trying to sell things - "samsung 753df monitor review" [slashdot.org] gives me one actual review and then a couple of pages worth of links to sites that simply include user reviews.

    Google really needs a better way to filter out these pages than having users type in "-consumer, -resale -'buy now!'".

    • Fawk - knew something seemed wrong there...

      Proper link for parent post [google.ca]

    • Also, all these Google bombs [wikipedia.org] add to the annoyance. Before it would be much easier to find what you were looking for, now you might have to go through several pages of results before you can find the right site. As a result of this, the quaility of search results produced just haven't been as outstanding as they once were. Google needs to do something about this.
    • Crap man, all you really need to know about all of the Samsung CRT computer monitors from the last two years is to avoid all of them like the plague. From the low maximum resolutions on the last generation to the extremely poor color range and poor contrast on the current generation there is no really good reason to buy a Samsung CRT computer monitor. The most maddening thing about this is that the picture looks fine on the 26" Samsung HDTV looks fine. This is despite the fact that Samsung uses the same
    • Google really needs a better way to filter out these pages than having users type in "-consumer, -resale -'buy now!'".

      I could actually live with using keywords to eliminate bad matches, if only Google would not limit the number of keywords you can enter to a measly 10.
  • Jeevus, I forgot the search existed.

    Ever since google became a verb, it's all I use.
  • I've read multiple comparisons between all these search engines, and most of the time (all the ones I've read, anyway), MSN Search comes out dead last. The question I have, is what does Microsoft have to say about all of this? I mean, they promised everyone the best, but now people are saying that their search, in summary, kind of sucks. Have they released an official statement justifying what's happening? Also, we do have to remember that this is only a beta test of their search engine (not that I'm defend

  • Speed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Concerned Onlooker ( 473481 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:44PM (#10808093) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why speed really matters in these cases. Can you really tell the difference between a .18 second return and a .97 second return once you account for varying connection speeds, internet traffic, etc? Is speed really a relevant criterion? Obviously I'm missing something.

    • Re:Speed (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Neo's Nemesis ( 679728 )
      the speed is actually logged on from the time a request is made to the database software and when results are returned. internet lag is not counted. thats an external factor.

      i have had google search results load up in minutes on a dialup when the time written for total search was 1 sec.

      it actually matters how fast you return your results. the sooner the better. the difference is not considerable right now but when lots and lots of traffic clogs your server with requests (catastrophe or mars migration day)

  • measured time for speed is flawed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pikine ( 771084 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:44PM (#10808096) Journal
    From TFA: Yahoo: 0.18 seconds. Google: 0.97 seconds. MSN: 0.92 seconds. Others not available.

    I think the author got these numbers from the search page, where the time is shown along the number of search results. However, the meaning of this number is not well-defined. I don't think it's even guaranteed to be accurate.

    (btw, I tried on Google for "raleigh" and I got 0.30 seconds. Yahoo gives me 0.12 seconds. Trying jumping around the search results page, Yahoo gives me about 0.25 seconds, and Google sometimes goes as high as 0.70 seconds. However, I must note that Yahoo doesn't let me jump over as many as +/- 5 pages, but Google lets me jump over +/- 10 pages.)
    • When yahoo gave me 0.25, that was a rare worst case scenario. Same as when I said when Google gave me 0.70. Actually, I just hit another worst case of Google that gave me 0.88 seconds.
      • Wow, and I keep getting worse numbers from google. 1.40 seconds. Maybe Google is now getting /.-ed?

  • Google? Not anymore (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheLibero ( 750207 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:44PM (#10808097)
    Well, I started to find Google exteremely furstrating now. Whenever I try to serach for documents/specifications/data sheets of a certain protocol or an idea that has a large commercial use, google would send you pages, and pages, and pages of products that matched these keywords. It's very obvious that companies are buying these keywords. Thus, they have higher priorities on our first few pages in the search results.
    • Not only this, but it's usually a totally irrelevant page, with keywords thrown in just to confuse you. I don't get these people.
    • "google would send you pages, and pages, and pages of products that matched these keywords"

      As long as the pages being returned contain the keywords (in other words, are accurate results), how is this a problem?

      • How is that a problem? The problem is that the returned pages are pages i'm not looking for :-) If I'd go to yahoo and search for the same exact keywords, I'd get my documents from the first time! (I'm not suggesting the yahoo have better seraching algorithms)
    • It's very obvious that companies are buying these keywords.

      s/buying/spamming/

      I'm not so paranoid to think Google is actually lying to us by selling sponsored links outside of their sponsored links area, but Google does have a major and growing problem with the effectiveness of link farm spammers. The quality of their results has really gone down as a result.

  • Easter eggs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adolfojp ( 730818 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:45PM (#10808098)
    I only visited Jeeves for the easter eggs. Sadly, it seems that most of them are now gone.

    Cheers,
    Adolfo

  • One, Two, Fou..., Thr..., ...Damn! (Score:4, Funny)

    by gregux ( 600239 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:49PM (#10808111)
    Search tests were conducted on five criteria:
    1. an obscure fact
    2. multiple meanings of "raleigh"
    3. speed
    4. current time in Sydney.

    If somebody involved with this story can't count to five, how seriously should we consider it?

    Sponsored by SILA -- Search for Intelligent Life in America
  • Google has problems coming up with accurate results for the phrase "to be or not to be". Altavista and others produce 100% accurate results in the top 10, while Google will have between 1 and 3 results of pages not containing the phrase.
    • It must be you. When I just searched for that phrase I got entirely relevant results. Three of the first four were as follows:

      Shakespeare - To be, or not to be: that is the question
      ART OF EUROPE. William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet
      3/1). To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis ...
      www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm - 4k - Cached - Similar pages

      William Shakespeare
      William Shakespeare 1564-1616. tobeornottobe.com.
      www.tobeornottobe.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages

      To B
    • Which would be why you put phrases in quotes, no?
      • "Which would be why you put phrases in quotes, no?"

        That is how I searched, and Google failed. When I point this out, people usually say how hard this is to do. Yet, it is easy using SQL logic to return strings containing substrings. It is so easy, in fact, that most other search engines have been doing this accurately for years. Finally, Google admitted that this is a bug and that they will fix it some day.

    • SBK. (Score:1)

      by eddy ( 18759 )

      >[...] Google will have between 1 and 3 results of pages not containing the phrase.

      What are you talking about? [google.com]

      All the hits on the first page contains the phrase, one is to a site containing the complete works of Shakespeare [tobeornottobe.com]. Why would you say this is not accurate?

    • There's a huge difference between these two queries:

      to be or not to be [google.com]

      and

      "to be or not to be" [google.com]

      • "There's a huge difference between these two queries"

        Which is why I did the one in quotes. The one that does not work as it should. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I said I did the search in quotes in the first place.

  • The trouble with Google (Score:3)

    by P-Nuts ( 592605 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:55PM (#10808141)
    The fact that Google has close to a monopoly on searching means there is too much of a chance that people will try to exploit its ranking system to push pages up the listings. Of course, I'm sure they are continually tweaking the ranking system to try to detect these pages, but if there were more search engines in popular use then it would be harder to find a way of exploiting them all at once.
    • "The fact that Google has close to a monopoly on searching means there is too much of a chance..."

      It has nothing like one. Yahoo search, msn, altavista, dogpile, and many others exist and are used. Monopoly means something, and Google sure does not fit the definition of one.

    • Under that premise, worms and exploits that take advantage of xp because of it's market share... Same thing IMO...

      No excuese for Google, just like there's no excuse for Microsoft.
  • Each search engine has strategically placed and promoted themselves in particular countries to make them the first choice.

    Hence, if the test was done at a time when users from a country were flooding an engine, considerable changes in return times would be there (still staying inside 1 sec).

    We are well aware that there isn't a single search engine that rules supreme in all the countries' networks.
  • It was in the test, did quite well, and was the only one not mentioned in the /. story.
    • Maybe because A9 is nothimg more than another "engine" which is based on Google's results. Hardly one that should be included in such tests.

  • Since when.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by omghi2u ( 808195 )
    Since when have people actually *used* Ask Jeeves? I've driven by their office (in LG) before, and it looks pretty sad. I can understand a shootout between MSN, Google, and Yahoo, but to incorporate Ask Jeeves is like inviting a Christmas Island to nuclear talks with North Korea.
    • Christmas Island to nuclear talks with North Korea.

      Well, the Christmas Islands could always have the mighty goatse-guy as their envoy...

      "You will either accept our terms or I will show..." ;)

  • From Google:

    "Your search - "lynndie england" - did not match any documents."

    "Your search - "lyndie england" - did not match any documents."

    nuff sed. ;-)

    Mark

  • jux2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joe094287523459087 ( 564414 ) <joe.joe@to> on Saturday November 13, 2004 @03:47PM (#10808441) Homepage
    i always use http://www.jux2.com

    it grabs results from google+yahoo+ask jeeves, and then ranks stuff according to how it appears in those. since there's only 35% overlap the results are usually better than using 1 engine alone.
  • Type "fuck microsoft" into Microshit's engine and then type "fuck google" into Google.

    Which search engine is better? Try it at home and you decide!

  • Not surprised the Beeb chose Jeeves & Wooster (Score:4, Funny)

    by michaeldot ( 751590 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @03:56PM (#10808490)

    Those snobby brits... Any tenuous connection to their fading culture and they're all over it!

    On a completely relevant note, I have a whole playlist of P G Wodehouse audiobooks on my iPod.

    Inspired, I'm going to start my own search engine called AskWooster. It will search for send its agents, called Gussie Finknottle, Tuppy Glossup and Bingo Little, out to seek for interesting stuff and return 3 cats, a fish and a size 14 top hat.

    Whoosh...! The sound of all this going completely over the heads of the /. crowd.

  • Can't believe they tested MSN Search... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @04:30PM (#10808662) Journal
    I'd like to defend Microsoft this time... Their new search engine is barely through the "technical preview" (aka alpha in this case) stage and has been given limited resources as it's only available for beta testing purposes.

    "The new competitor MSN has had teething problems and we should bear in mind this is a test mode."

    Yeah, so why didn't you test the finished product? If they would've tested MSN Search, at least test search.msn.com and not beta.search.msn.com as they apparently have done. It's not interesting to me as a reader to see the performance of a search engine where very little fine tuning has been done. It's not like I'd use a search engine with little hardware resources causing more time-outs than succesful searches anyway, even if it would win in the test.

  • Teoma, Vivisimo and AllTheWeb (Score:3, Informative)

    by danila ( 69889 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @04:51PM (#10808791) Homepage
    I know that I use non-google search engines quite a lot, so I decided to contribute with my results. I repeated the test for Teoma [teoma.com], Vivisimo [vivisimo.com] and AllTheWeb [alltheweb.com]. The results are presented below in the format generally similar to that in the BBC article.

    These sites don't give the time it took them, so I could only measure how fast the page loaded. My connection is relatively slow (google loads in 2-3 seconds, Yahoo in 7 seconds), so speed measurements are not very reliable or useful, but I gave them anyway.

    It's not clear from the BBC article what was the exact query for the second test. I used "What's the reported IQ of an Alsatian" (without quotes) for the first attempt (later I tried this at Google and it didn't work, so consider this attempt invalid). After none of the search engines gave anything, I tried "Alsatian dog IQ" (without quotes).

    Teoma [teoma.com]:
    1. No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
    2. 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
    3. 7 seconds
    4. No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
    5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
    Vivisimo [vivisimo.com]:
    1. Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
    2. Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
    3. 10 seconds
    4. No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed [embassy.org.nz] (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
    5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
    AllTheWeb [alltheweb.com]:
    1. 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
    2. 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
    3. 5 seconds
    4. No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
    5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.
    Conclusions: AllTheWeb is excellent for searching, basically as good as Google (from this very limited test). Vivisimo is good for searching, clustering is very good. Teoma no as good - didn't find the charity.

    Refinements at Teoma are almost as good as Jeeves. Refinements at Vivisimo the clustering is not as effective as at Jeeves (because the number of search results is smaller), but still good. Refinements at AllTheWeb, though there wasn't any for explorer or charity.

    Interface is great everywhere, no gimmicks, like at A9 (which has a monstrously huge 200Kbyte page), everything is slick. Frame interface at Vivisimo is good. Not too much ads, at Vivisimo they are marked, at AllTheWeb they are marked too, but not as well, and Teoma doesn't have ads.

    Next I will try some visual search tools (Grokker [groxis.com], Kartoo [kartoo.com], etc.) and will post the results in the reply to this post.
    • In addition to some non-traditional plain search engines I decided to test three visual search tools: Grokker [groxis.com] - a desktop application for Windows,
      flash-based Kartoo [kartoo.com] and HTML-based Mooter [mooter.com]. First I searched for "raleigh" and tried exploring the visual results. The next search was for "Alsatian dog IQ", the last for "what is the time in Sydney". I didn't expect to see the results on the first page, since these engines are not really page-oriented, I was willing to quickly refine the results using their special
      • Hey Danilla, Great search engine research. If you have a Mac (and the time) maybe you can try theConcept [mesadynamics.com] and give a similarly detailed analysis of its use (perhaps data mining results from Google). Since it's my company, I'm biased on its usefulness (as a keyphrase analyzer its approach to search is somehwat different from the "find the answer" test your trying) but I'd definitely be interested in your comments or suggestions, given your expertise in this field.

  • Actually, Ask Jeeves is kinda interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @05:16PM (#10808946) Journal
    These are the searches I made in order and nothing cut out except for the cases where a question didn't give anything on page 1 for either of the engines.

    Who created Slashdot?

    Ask Jeeves: CmdrTaco as #1 (correct answer)
    Google: CmdrTaco as #4

    Who designed Ford?

    Ask Jeeves: Henry Ford Academy as #1 (HF is correct)
    Google: Nothing about Henry Ford on first page

    What wavelength is red?

    Ask Jeeves: 622-780 nm from search result description of #1
    Google: "about 650 nm" if you follow link and read on in the page of #1

    Sometimes we see negative side effects from this question system...

    Where can I download Nero?

    Ask Jeeves: First links to download service that did indeed have Nero as a download, but versions from 2000. Ahead.de as #3
    Google: Ahead.de as #2 (a completely unrelated site as #1)

    I tried to refine... :-)

    Where can I download the latest version of Nero?

    Ask Jeeves: Got confused, but finally got the proper link (official download page) as #8
    Google: Nero 6.6.0.1 (correct!) at unofficial site as #1, official site as #2.

    Do SCO have a case? :-)

    Ask Jeeves: Groklaw.net as #1
    Google: NewsForge analysing article as #1 and other SCO related news articles.

    When do Revenge of the Sith have its premiere?

    Ask Jeeves: "has its worldwide premiere on May 19, 2005" according to search result description for #2.
    Google: Nothing in search result descriptions, and nothing I could find by following a few search result links on page 1.
    • > Ask Jeeves: Groklaw.net as #1
      > Google: NewsForge analysing article as #1 and other SCO related news articles.

      Groklaw blocks the Google spider, last I heard.
      I think the reason stated was that they did not want to swamp search results for the SCO lawsuits, or something like that. I don't see the point. Groklaw is a perfectly fine starting point for researching them, IMHO, but then my name is not Darl McBride...
    • One more question:

      What is the worst search engine?
      Google: MSN at #4
      Ask Jeeves: No mention of MSN on the first page
  • This may be the nicest thing anyone's ever said about Jeeves

    Piffle. Bertie Wooster has many nice things to say about Jeeves. Why just the other day, I popped into the Drones for a dash of the t. and g. and no other than Bertram Wooster himself was holding forth at the billiards table, singing high praises of Jeeves, his valet. I believe the tone was something like, "The old boy has a large protrubence at the top-back of his head. That's where the brain is. It comes from eating fish and reading some crime

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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