Searching the term “furniture store“, what search engine would you use? MSN? Yahoo? Google?
In the battle of the search engines (much like the battle of the satellite radio companies XM and Sirius) there is no clear winner at this point. However, there is much to say about these competitors that makes fair competition the reason why we have such innovative technology. We are fortunate to have two of the most sophisticated search engines at our fingertips to provide us with the most ‘relevant’ websites, namely Yahoo and Google.
The components of a search results is simple. You have your search bar, search results, paid advertisement to the right and above the search results, and other links (i.e. preferences, filtered searches, and additional resources). However, many internet surfers, when they are looking to purchase products, often only looks at two places, the first two pages of search results or the paid advertisement. The reason being is that most internet surfers rely on the algorithms and some trust that either Yahoo or Google will provide the user with the most reasonable results.
For example, if you type in “visiondecor” in either browser, you should be able to see Visiondecor Furniture’s website as the top result. It is as expected, however, searching for a term such as “furniture store” or “furniture” will yield completely different relevant results, shown below.
The above picture shows the results between both Google and Yahoo and where they rank the top 100 searches for “furniture store” and organized it in the way where you can see which search engine ranked what and where. It’s apparent that both results picked up similar results, but ranked them completely different. However, the differences does not mean you will not get the similar results it just means that each search engine values the results differently. A real life example would be the same situation if you asked two different people their opinion on a movie that they watched together. Naturally they will emphasize on different aspects of the movie, but ultimately they will be able to get the story across to the viewer.
Which is better? Honestly, they are about the same. However, since Google is currently the number one used search engine (not by accuracy, but by popularity) they will more likely spend more time giving you better results, tools, and resources to keep you as a loyal customer. Over time people naturally would stay with one search engine or another because they conditioned us to think and react to the way the results are displayed.
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