Actually I have a two part question. Part one is the title of the thread: which search engine is the best? Google? Yahoo? Bing? Other?
Also, is one of these more favored by Apple? It seems they prefer Google right now, but how quickly might they change to another one?
Thanks.
There is no universally accepted metric for search engine goodness. They all have different and largely overlapping features.
As for Apple, I don’t know what you mean by them “favoring” Google, other than the fact that they provide a Google search bar in Safari. (Firefox also has one by default.)
I’m moving this to IMHO–not that it was bad to start it in General Questions, but rather the replies will necessarily be informed opinions.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
This reminds me of some search engine nits that I have.
Back in the day, Altavista used to have a feature in search called NEAR. In short, you would put a query in such as “Bwana” NEAR “Straight Dope”, and you would be presented with links to sites where these two phrases appeared within 5 or so words of each other. It was so bleepin’ useful, unlike the AND which hits anything that is on the same page even if it’s 12 paragraphs away. Unfortunately, they no longer support it as far as I can see.
Does anyone know of any search engines that do support that syntax?
Also, are there any engines that actually obey your wishes and do strict phrase searches? I go crazy when I use Google advanced search, enter a phrase in the “exact wording or phrase” box and the damn thing gives me searches that contain “subsets”. I don’t want subsets, I want exact matches or nothing.
Any help on this?
According to both Google and Bing, it’s Dogpile.
BwanaBob, look here for some powerful Google operands. I think the * will give you something similar to AltaVista’s NEAR. That page also shows you how to do exact matching using quotes rather than the advanced search page.
From Google:
“Google” Results 1 - 10 of about 319,000,000 for Google. (0.13 seconds)
“Bing” Results 1 - 10 of about 52,400,000 for Bing [definition]. (0.12 seconds)
“yahoo” Results 1 - 10 of about 2,310,000,000 for Yahoo [definition]. (0.07 seconds)
From Yahoo:
“Google” 1 - 10 of 5,180,000,000 for Google (About) - 0.02 s
“Bing” 1 - 10 of 212,000,000 for Bing (About) - 0.13 s
“Yahoo” 1 - 10 of 8,860,000,000 for Yahoo (About) - 0.04 s
From Bing:
“Google” 1 of 222,000,000 results
“Bing” 1-14 of 5,680,000 results
“Yahoo” 1 of 297,000,000 results
My completely non-scientific results:
a) The frequency in which the words show up across the internet: 1) Yahoo 2)Google 3) Bing. This order remains consistent through all three search engines.
b) The total results brought in for each search term: 1) Yahoo 2) Google 3) Bing. Again, this result remains consistent for each search engine.
My completely non-scientific results:
Quantifying both popularity of search term and results displayed, the order of “best” search engine is 1) Yahoo 2) Google 3) Bing
My preference:
Google
Easy - what’s in the popular lexicon? You don’t Yahoo something, or Bing an obscure topic, you Google it. Google wins.
Eh, you gotta remember that Yahoo has been around a lot longer than Google. Yahoo is also the name of their news outfit (which I think is bigger than Google’s), their mail service and their IM client.
If you have issues with your Yahoo mail you post a thread about Yahoo Mail, thus adding to the number of times the term “Yahoo” is found on the Web. If you have problems with Google’s mail service, you post a thread about GMail. Same with Yahoo Messenger vs. GTalk.
Bing is somewhat similar, in that it’s the name of a cherry and the last name of a popular TV character (Chandler from the show Friends). Even Yahoo is a word on its own. Other than the comic character Barney Google, I can’t think of any other popular use of the word “Google.”
So I think your non-scientific survey is pretty flawed. But good on you for coming up with something 
You’re correct which is why I’m not holding much stock in my own analysis. Nevertheless, one thing that is telling is the result in absolute numbers. Yahoo (the search engine) consistently found more results for “Google” “Bing” and “Yahoo” than either of its two counterparts. That’s an indication that the search engine probes deeper into the internet.
Of course, none of this analysis even begins to answer what search engine is easiest to use and which one provides the most topical hits on the first page of results, arguably the two most important features in a search engine.
“Chevrolet” - 83,900,000 hits
“Bentley” - 42,000,000 hits
Therefore Chevrolets are better than Bentleys.
Even your other argument, that Yahoo! goes deeper, is really flawed. AltaVista also finds 8,660,000,000 results for Yahoo! What good does that do anybody? AltaVista is the disorganized giant heap of web searching.
Google’s huge innovation was to do a second analysis after the spidering to determine relevance (and to determine which were good directories, and which were good content pages). Google is filtering out useless results. That’s exactly why it was better than anything which came before.
Thanks jjimm but the * option is really nothing like NEAR. Wild cards give way too much leeway in matches. Plus they’re order dependent. NEAR was good for something like this: (“Elaine Smith” OR “Smith, Elaine” OR “Elaine G. Smith”, “Smith, Elaine G.”) reduces to Elaine NEAR Smith.
I’m really more angry about the fact that the exact phrase selection in Google Advanced search apparently means “nearly exact or close”. What bleeping language do they speak there anyway? Exact has a distinct definition.
It’s like they feel guilty they didn’t find what you wanted so they give the next best thing. Even worse, they don’t seem to rank their near hits so that the actual phrase you wanted may be the 20th in their list, and the 1st thru 19th are the subsets.
Right, usually when you’re searching you don’t want to find ten million pages, you want to find one particular page. The other 9,999,999 hits are just making things harder for you, not easier. This is the problem with omnibus search engines like Dogpile that search through all the others: You get more noise for the same amount of signal.
Of course, if you’re talking about nerd-rapping prowess, google has the slight edge.
Well, yeah 
It’s odd that you provide the numbers and then proceed to point out the uselessness of index size as a search quality metric…
Doesn’t the default syntax (Elaine Smith) or even the AND (Elaine AND Smith) already do this? For example, a search for Smith AND Elaine still returns a bunch of Elaine Smith hits.
Could you give an example? When is a quoted phrase (like “smith elaine”, which doesn’t return elaine smith hits) not an exact search?
It’s hard to measure search engine quality directly, but market share seems like a reasonable proxy. It’s no contest: Google outperforms the second place competitor by an order of magnitude.
Altavista also had a GREAT feature that google doesn’t: wildcards within words.
“recipes for diabe*”
will find both “recipes for diabetics” and “recipes for diabetes”
Is there any search engine that lets you use * in the middle of words?
I’m not sure if you know this, but Google does have a “stemming” technology that automatically searches for other ways to phrase your query. Searching for recipes for diabetes will also give you some results for “diabetics” with no effort on your part: See how “diabetics” is highlighted in #18 and #19?
Likewise, a search for AI will automatically return results for Artificial Intelligence as well.
Yeah - that’s the biggest anti-feature in the world.
I HATE how I can’t specify an exact search string in Google. Even with quotes, I end up getting all kinds of unrelated garbage. When I search for “AI”, I don’t want to get results for “Artificial Intelligence”!
Or, “American Idol”!