Search more than one search engine or you're missing a lot
A recent report from Dogpile (a great metasearch engine) found that the overlap in search engine results is decreasing...and it wasn't that high to begin with. Search Engine Land has a great write-up of the report. Here are some highlights:
- In 2007, "only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same" across the four top search engines.
- Maybe you're thinking--that's not fair! you can't expect a lot of overlap between four different engines! How about two? Well, it's better, but still only 8.9% overlap in the first page's results between two engines.
- Overall, this works out to 88.3% of total results being unique to one engine.
It means we should be using metasearch engines. Or we should be using more than one engine at a time. We should try to educate our users about this. We should try to make it clear that if you're looking for research, for comprehensive answers, one engine ain't gonna do it for ya.
clipped from: librarianinblack.typepad.com