The BBC does a search engine comparison, big deal.

Here's a search engine comparison done by the BBC that means almost nothing. With Microsoft finally entering the race with their own search algorithm, I guess there had to be a comparison. Big deal. This kind of comparison is near useless to the average listener or user because search isn't about statistics, it's about being able to find what you want to see.

This comparison is so thin, that it really doesn't tell us anything really useful. Another thing about the article is that search will not only be about the major search engines in the future. There are going to be many players with a search engine tailored to a certain type of searcher or group.

The only way that you can really compare any of these is to try each one for a while, a week or two and then find out over everything you've done, which one worked the best. Using one search term and testing each based on that is not reality nor how people use search. When people are searching for something, it's not about who has the most results or the most pages in the index or how fast it returned the results, it's about the results themselves. Did the person searching find what they were looking for? These benchmark tests are meaningless. In fact, most of the major search engines have very similar results, so it's like choosing Coke or Pepsi. Either way you're going to get the job done.

Have you gotten the feeling that search algorithms, no matter who develops them, will have a similar result? Does that mean that like the laws of physics, do search engines come to the same conclusions because nature demands it?

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