Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

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Results differ between search engines

A new study has found dramatic differences in the results that search engines deliver.

Dogpile and Infospace conducted the research which found that first page results on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask overlapped by less than one per cent. Furthermore, only 3.6% of the top ranked organic search results were the same across all search engines for any given query. This is half that of two years ago.

The report highlighted that 88.3% of all results were unique to one search engine, and this figure drops dramatically to just 8.9% if two search engines had the same results. This figure drops further still to just 2.2% of total results were shared by three search engines and 0.6% of total results were shared by all four.

It also found that 69.6% of Google's first page search results were unique to its search engine. For Yahoo! the figure was 79.4%, it is 80.1% for MSN, and 75% for Ask.

With regard to sponsored links, only 4.6% of Yahoo! and Google results overlap.

For 22.8% of all queries, Google did not return a sponsored link, whereas Yahoo! returned one or more. In 9.9% of cases Yahoo! did not return a sponsored link whereas Google returned one or more.

Also see Search engine differences explained

M.P

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