A small search engine test

As a long time google fan it pains me to say this… but of the big three google.com seems to return the worst results for my sites.

Search for “link:http://blog.tc.dk”:
Google: 6 results, 5 of them from blog.tc.dk itself
Live.com: 6 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk itself (plus a “view more from this site” option).
Yahoo.com: 13 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk it self.

Search for link:http://barbue.dk
Google: one page (from an ODP mirror page)
Live.com: 36 results (largely relevant!)
Yahoo.com: Several hundred, but most of them seems to be ODP links

Search for link:gallery.tc.dk
Google: Nothing
Live.com: 6 results (including one from blog.tc.dk)
Yahoo.com: 9 results (including two from gallery.tc.dk)

Overall it seems that Yahoo.com has the best index, but it also returned more irrelevant results. Google just seem to suck.

I’ll try some more searches later…

3 thoughts on “A small search engine test

  1. Another Tom Christensen

    Hi Tom

    It’s well known that Google’s link feature doesn’t work. It only shows a tiny fraction of the links Google actually knows about. They seem to do this as an anti-spamming measure, but I don’t see what it accomplishes really. Yahoo’s linkdomain: is the best for finding out about links — it’s likely Google knows about most or all the ones Yahoo knows.

    I have some <a href="http://www.rightreading.com…">info about search engines here</a>.

    Reply
  2. Another Tom Christensen

    If you do a Yahoo linkdomain: search on http://blog.tc.dk you will get 178 results. If you then take out the ones from your own domain you still get 101 links to the entire site and 27 to the main page.

    A nice thing about the way Yahoo lists the results is they’re more or less weighted with the ones that transmit the most link juice first. Google’s results seem almost randomized.

    Reply

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