I keep hearing that “Bing is now giving Google a run for its money”. A while ago I heard the same about Duck Duck Go.
So I decided to do the simplest experiment I could think of: take a subject on which I am the foremost expert (me!) and search it.
Here are the first 4 results in each:
- Google: This blog, my livejournal, my facebook, my twitter
- Bing: Linked-in profile, Facebook profile, Linked-in profile again, notes from an old talk of mine
- DDG: Facebook profile, twitter profile, Linked-in profile, a link to Microsoft Research page with links to two of my papers and one paper by a Moshe Zadka who’s into Chemistry
Conclusion:
- On Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Livejournal, my “web site” field is a link to this blog
- Therefore, finding this blog cannot be this hard for a crawler who saw me on FB, Twitter, LI and LJ
- Yet, even though both Bing and DDG found all other profiles, they clearly did not think that this blog merits mention in the *first page* (yes, none of them had it on the first page)
- Google is, sadly, unrivaled for search. If this is what these engines give for me, how badly do they do on other things?
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Which computer did you google from? You do know that google search is personalized. For example, the 4th hit when I google “Lisbon” is a link to the math department at Instituto Superior Técnico. Most people would not get this result at all…