Each separate trademark to its company, as a service in the information technology industry, Google, Yahoo! and even Bing will search to best of their ability and retrieve information for us on the Internet. Using their own patented algorithms, the reality is that a search engine will only retrieve as relevant of requested information that its own technology is designed to find—they have their limits. Some are more glaring than other minor issues. But all of this became much more aware to me recently, when I found a new search engine called Duck Duck Go.
I know what you're thinking. Probably, "Oh, not another..." Nope. It's not just another search engine. I wasn't happy after a week of trying Bing. And I was more interested in finding an alternative to Google. Don't get me wrong—Google's great! For a lot of things Google provides a great product or service, but in my opinion, Google's search engine has been lacking. And one of many reasons why I believe Duck Duck Go is the best search engine since the birth of the Internet!
And here's my test to prove it.
I used the extremely rare, technical search query, "metalworking inurl:blog" because, according to SEOmoz, in an entry posted by a member who goes by the name randfish, he said this:
Understanding how search engine query demand works is vital to judging an engine's performance. Some engines are excellent at returning great results for the most popular queries their users run, but provide very little value in the 'tail' of the demand curve. To be a great engine, you must be able to answer both.
SEOmoz member randfish also defined search engine "Relevancy," as another quality of search performance. Relevancy is defined by the core quality of the results — the more on-topic and valuable they are in fulfilling the searcher's goals and expectations, the higher the relevancy. Thus, taking the most technical, rare search query from a search engine comparison chart, I used the following scale to compare Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.com (Duck Duck Go had to be in its own browser window because the comparison site I used only compared "top" search engines).
The results I got from each of the four search engines using the query "metalworking inurl:blog" were quite interesting. The first image below will show you the results from (image: left-to-right) Google, Yahoo!, and Bing; the second image is the results following the same query but using Duck Duck Go.
Click to enlarge imageThe results are clear. Bing didn't even know what to find, or how to find it. So its top result was simply a forum talking about the search engine comparison chart, while the second result was to SEOmoz comparing the search engine results. Then as you scroll down past a few more offbeat links, the remaining results were in Japanese or something. So I couldn't tell what Bing had found for me. Both Google and Yahoo! gave somewhat relevant results, according to the rating scale for comparing search engines, Google and Yahoo! both received a 3.75 rating.
Click for larger imageThe results found using DuckDuckGo's search engine were very different, clearly. The results all appear to come from relevant websites on the topic of my test search, the website is clean looking, and the URL's seem respectable. And I didn't even "Duck It!" But I'll let you be the judge. Those are the results I got, and it seemed worthy enough as results to share with those who might be interested.
Most people love to try new things. Right? Besides, who wouldn't want to try out something new if it could mean a more satisfying "surf" experience on the Web—? So here's an alternative engine that I found compelling enough to share—and now you know why I "Duck It!"
Posts
1 comments:
Duck Duck Go certainly looks nice (like Google, your right, it is clean), but Google has so many other aspects about it (ie. Google maps) it's difficult to imagine another search engine becoming the dominant player anytime soon. Like you mention, one thing I like about Duck Duck Go is the first page results. One of my results brought up 'dexknows' and other times it found other brand name sites that I'm not used to finding on Google's first page results. Which is cool. But even then, I find Google has such a large database of all different kinds of websites. I'd say if anything, duckduckgo could compete against Yahoo and easily against Bing, but Google? That's a toughy.
Post a Comment