Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

What Exactly is a Good Search Engine?

Some times back I had carried a post where I showed how, for a particular term, Google and Yahoo both failed to give relevant result and surprisingly Live Search pointed to the correct site as the first result.

This incidence showed me that definition for a Good search engine is relative and depends on the keyword you are searching for. While I always use Google for search, it was the first time I realized that live.com was not bad after all.

Since then, Live.com has given way to Bing.com, a new search engine from Microsoft which promises improvement not only in result quality but also in user experience. And now that today I got to read  Webmaster Tools Give “Live” a Second Life, I achieved another realization, that definition for a Good search engine is also relative to and depends on the people. Let me expand this statement with more explanation as under

The are two type of people using a search engine. First is the Researcher, as we all know, who searches for information that he needs using the search engine. Second one is the Webmaster, who makes all his efforts to make sure that his site is the one which is visited by researcher, even if there is a lot of competition out there. We all now this process as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). At one point of time Google became synonym to SEO by providing webmasters with all the tools that webmasters could use to rate and improve their sites. After this no webmaster cared for other search engines as they could improve themselves to suit Google and get the extra traffic that others could not have generated easily.

Yahoo was next to understand this secret and thus it came up with Site Explorer. While Webmasters started giving importance to Yahoo, Live.com was looked at with hatred as it never cared to provide webmasters with similar tools.

Better late than never, Bing the new search engine by Microsoft includes a Webmaster Center and already we have Webmasters who have started praising Bing. After all, at the end of the day it’s only traffic that matters!