I’ve been frustrated on and off over the years with search engines. When the internet started to get popular 17 years ago in 1994, there were multitudes of search engines and they all varied in search results, speed and ease of use. About 10 years ago I started using google.com and until they started adding in their auto search function, I was happy. I started using yahoo, but only through it’s search.yahoo.com interface which is a cleaner and quicker to load start page than just yahoo.com. It works quite well. But I’ve decided to try others.
I tested Bing, Google, Yahoo, GigaBlast, Ask, Web Crawler, Entire Web and Dog Pile. What I found is that Google, Yahoo and Bing all have similar search results that are quite accurate as well as a relatively pleasing interface. The others tested substantially slower with EntireWeb.com being the slowest of them all and Dog Pile a close second. Yahoo still wins on speed and results I want as well as the most comfortable interface. The only other notable search engine I tried really was EntireWeb.com. The big feature it offers, it loads a thumbnail of the pages it finds to the left of the title and description. This does slow it down a bit, but is actually handy in some scenarios.
End results: it’s still Yahoo for me with an honorable mention to EntireWeb.com.
