LISNews.com referenced this article and I thought it was very interesting. The article tends to focus on the search engine Dogpile.com but it also illustrates how each search engine has a unique set of web sites and displays the results completely differently based on their algorithms. It is something to keep in mind when you need to find something online or when your patrons claim they already search online (Google) and they can't find it.


Major Search Engines Deliver Much Different Results
By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek
1:35 PM EDT Thu. May. 12, 2005

Brief excerpt:
"The study found that just over 3% of the returned results--10,712 of 336,232 links--were shared by Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo. Some 12% of the returned results were listed by two of the three search engines. And 85% of the results were unique to one of the three search engines."