Search Engine Shoot-Out

By Jeff Bertolucci, PC World

"Whether you're searching for text, video, images, news, or local information, you have lots of options beyond Google. We tried dozens of search engines and found some worthy challengers to the king.

Not many brands become verbs, as in "I googled [fill in the blank] last night." Nielsen/NetRatings' January 2007 report found that more than half of all Web queries in the United States in that month went through Google. The second-most-popular engine, Yahoo Search, garnered less than half that amount.

Which led us to wonder: Does Google deserve all that traffic, or is it living off its reputation? Are people using it because they're not aware of other, potentially better search engines? To find out, we pitted Google against its big-name competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, as well as against smaller challengers such as AlltheWeb, AltaVista, and Ask.com--plus a couple dozen of the specialty search services, including Blogdigger, Picsearch, and TubeSurf."

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,130979/printable.html


Technorati Tags: google search, yahoo search, Microsoft Live search