Overlap Among Major Web Search Engines

Purpose – This paper reports the findings of a major study examining the overlap among results retrieved by three major web search engines. The goal of the research was to: measure the overlap across three major web search engines on the first results page overlap (i.e. share the same results) and the differences across a wide range of user defined search terms; determine the differences in the first page of search results and their rankings (each web search engine’s view of the most relevant content) across single-source web search engines, including both sponsored and non-sponsored results; and measure the degree to which a meta-search web engine, such as Dogpile.com, provides searchers with the most highly ranked search results from three major single source web search engines. Design/methodology/approach – The authors collected 10,316 random Dogpile.com queries and ran an overlap algorithm using the URL for each result by query. The overlap of first result page search f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ITNG
• Authors: Amanda Spink, Bernard J. Jansen, Chris Blakely, Sherry Koshman
• Keywords: ITNG 2006, Major Web Search, Single-source Web Search, Web Search Engines