My Search Engine Shoot-Out

James Tanner writes about many interesting genealogy topics, but this one spurred me to perform my own search using his methodology.  See James' post Search Engine Shoot Out for details of the different search engines, and his own results.

I'm going to do two tests using the same methodology that James used:

1)  A search for "thomas j. newton" "sophia buck":

Google.com Total 1,417 (including 7 "personal results")
Bing.com Total 9
Yahoo! Total 7
Ask.com No total given but 6 listed 
Aol.com Total 7
mywebsearch.com Total 7
Lycos.com Total 9
Dogpile  Total 10
About.com Total 0
Mocavo.com Total "about" 70

2)  A search for "genealogical proof standard"

Google.com Total 21,680 (including 180 "personal results")
Bing.com Total 17,000
Yahoo! Total 14,600
Ask.com No total given but after about 210, the results were duplicated
Aol.com Total about 21,000
mywebsearch.com Total 1,460
Lycos.com Total 14,700
Dogpile  Total 369
About.com Total 24
Mocavo.com Total 3,179

Of course, I did not check for duplications in each of those sites - I just quoted the number provided (or tried to figure out a number if no number was given).

The newest search engine, Mocavo (for genealogy results only), seems  to be holding its own in these tests.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/03/my-search-engine-shoot-out.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver