Search Engine Review

Reviews of search engines

A search engine's job is to sort through millions of links and websites to find the information users are looking for. It turns out searching the Web is the easy part. Ranking the most relevant results on an Internet increasingly clogged with advertising and unreliable information is the challenge all search engines face as they compete to provide the most relevant information in the most usable way. In addition to searching basic web pages, the best search engines help you search for images, videos, news items and blogs. While some users want quick, direct answers to their questions, others want a search engine that serves as a complete portal to the Web. Advanced search features let you filter results by language, date, domain (for example, .edu for scholarly sources) and much more. Search toolbars can be integrated into your web browser, making Internet searches more convenient.

Research librarians specialize in finding the best ways to find information on the Internet. We found credible recommendations from the librarians at the University of California, Berkeley, updated in June 2010. Berkeley's top three picks, Google, Yahoo and Exalead, remain the same since the last time we updated this report. The library site also includes a table of features that can help users narrow and refine searches.

Comparison tests of search engines take a scientific approach to comparing the top results from two or more search engines to the same queries. We found only a few recent comparative tests. The Daily Beast conducted a comparative test in 2010 and named Google the best choice. We also looked at a 2008 test by CrowdFlower.com, comparing the three most popular search engines based on 500 random queries. Although Microsoft has remodeled its search engine from Live to Bing, the comparison between Google and Yahoo remains valid and consistent with more recent results. However, because of the small number of recent comparative tests, we relied on expert opinion and single product reviews to complete this report.

Much of the recent talk around search engines involves search engine optimization, techniques websites use to get the most visible rankings in search results. Websites that offer quality content simply want the highest search rankings SEO can provide so they can reach readers and customers. However, many sites use SEO to game the system by masking spam-filled web pages to look like legitimate sites containing valid search results. For example, experts say health-related searches often produce pages generated by so-called content farms, web companies that generate massive amounts of content aimed to attract readers to advertising-laden pages. Often, the experts say, the content writers are not health experts at all and the information is poorly researched and written. Search engines constantly upgrade their algorithms -- the mathematical formulas used to power searches -- to filter out ad spam and phony sites. We looked at reviews for two new search engines, Blekko and DuckDuckGo, which have taken the lead in fighting spam and content farm results.