Testing Search Engines
Jeff Bertolucci of the PC World has this fascinating article titled Search engine shoot-out: How we tested the search engines. It says:
We tested a total of 55 services in six categories: general (text info), video, mobile/local, news, images, and blogs. We conducted our tests over three weeks. We used ten terms in each category. For general text-information searches, for instance, our categories included technology, pop culture, research/academic topics, books, and travel/shopping. In each category we posed what we considered an easy query and a difficult one: Just about every search engine could find the 2007 Academy Award winners, for example, but only a few could locate a portrait of Italian poet-philosopher Giambattista Vico. We tested the engines at different times of the day–morning, afternoon, and night–on all seven days of the week.
We performed all of our testing on the same Windows system, a 2-GHz Celeron desktop with 512MB of memory and a 1.5-megabits-per-second (download speed) AT&T/Yahoo DSL Internet connection. We didn't test for query speed, but this typically varied by only fractions of a second. Among the most-popular search sites, we saw little difference in between the time we pressed Enter and the appearance of the search results. However, we did detect significant differences among the blog-search engines, with some smaller sites–such as Best of the Blogs–taking several seconds to post the results. For the local-search tests, we used a Nokia E62 smart phone.
Using Search Engines | admin | 29 May 2007 |
