So who among the search engines are the most relevant?

A French Relevancy Study Puts Yahoo & Google Tied.

Jean Véronis together wih his students at Université de Provence has published the results of a relevancy study they conducted. In the study, they used 3 american search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, along with 3 french ones Exalead, Voila and Dir.com.

In summary, here's what was done:

* Students were assigned topics and allowed to craft queries in French however they thought best to search for information on those topics.

* The first page of results from the search engines involved for each query were retrieved. Only French-language results were pulled back, and the porn filter at each service was used (and US Department Of Justice, take note --- the study found these worked very well).

* Students then reviewed the URLs retrieved to see if they were generally on the topic of the search. Each URL was scored to the relevancy of the topic, 0 being worst, 5 being perfect.

On a relevancy rating from 0 to 5 Scores were:

* Google/Yahoo: 2.3
* MSN: 2.0
* Exalead: 1.8
* Dir: 1.4
* Voila: 1.2

More at SEW and Jean's blog