Search Engines Are Lousy Trivial Pursuit Players

Many of us have probably wondered, at some point, which was the best search engine out there. And seeing that today they're offering almost the same services, it's actually quite hard to tell.

Well, it seems that there's someone who managed to answer this question. According to Danny Sullivan's post on the SearchEngineWatch Blog, writer Michael Liedtke from Associated Press has decided to test the search engines' capabilities by getting them involved in a simple game of trivial pursuit.

Liedtke has tested Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Answers.com, and according to what he has seen, the search engines rarely met the goal of providing a single clear answer.

He used two different criteria in evaluating the results. First, he made up a score regarding the search engines' capability to get him to the right answer via the first link on the page, with twenty queries in all. By using this criterion, Ask Jeeves & Answers.com came in first, with 50 percent success rate, followed by Google with 40 percent success rate and then Yahoo and MSN with 25, respectively 10 percent success rate.

The second criterion Liedtke used was to examine how often the engines completely failed to lead him to a page with the answer after he scanned 3 pages of search results. And here's how the finish line looks like. Tied for the first place, Ask Jeeves, Answers.com & Google with 15 percent failure rate (3 out of 20 times), followed by MSN & Yahoo, failing 6 out of 20 times and thus obtaining a 30 percent failure rate.

However, this rather unscientific and funny testing method also offers a very serious conclusion. The search engines still have to work a lot on their semantic search capabilities before their services will be able to supply completely accurate results.