Incoherent Babble

I guess the biggest thing I found of interest today was catching up on Mark Jen’s blog. Remember him? He’s the guy that started blogging about working for Google, and then got fired for it, but kept blogging about all sorts of random other topics.

Well, I haven’t really thought about him, nor his blog, until today. I really figured he’d lose his job and not have anything to write about, and fizzle out rather quickly. I was, however, pleased to find that he hadn’t. One article form some time in February (I’m greatly disappointed that Blogger doesn’t put dates on any posts), discussed his recent change in default search engines. Mark performed his “me test”. Basically, he put his name into all of the “Big 3″ search engines (those being Google [google.com], Yahoo! [search.yahoo.com] and MSN [search.msn.com] if you couldn’t guess). Each search engine was rated based on the number of results, and the number therein which were relevant. Mark found that his own blog only ranked number 2 on his long-running favorite, Google, and that he was number 1 on Yahoo! (MSN failed to include him at all).

I, of course, had to perform the “me test” for myself to verify his results. Here are my results (not that the “Results” indicate the numbers out of the first 10 results that I currently hold):

• Google
  • Results: 9 and 10
  • Comments: Both results were for old and long since abandoned pages. Upon further investigation, the first real result arrives in the 11th slot, representing the now defunct Reign Tools. Nothing else is found in the 3 pages of results, aside from an old mailing list post for the IPCop firewall.
  • Features: Spelling Corrections, Defintions, Cached pages, Similar pages
• Yahoo!
  • Results: 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Comments: Dacnomm Network Services, Incoherent Babble, Lyrics at Dacnomm, and DacnommNET IRC are all represented in the results.
  • Features: Definitions, Cached pages, Similar pages (”More from this site”)
• MSN
  • Results: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Comments: DacnommNET IRC, Dacnomm Network Services, Journals at Dacnomm, Lyrics at Dacnomm and the Re!gn Spy Center (now defunct) are all represented in these results.
  • Features: Cached pages

As you can see, Yahoo! and MSN both have much broader coverage than Google for my results. While I’ve used Google for many years as my primary and only search engine, I simply can’t ignore the lack of relevant results found when searching even simply for myself. Even though MSN technically has the best results, I simply can’t bring myself to think of them as a legitimate alternative. Not only are they lacking in extra features, but they also have an ad-infested homepage, but they also seem to be constantly playing “catch-up” to Google and Yahoo! alike. Perhaps when they learn to clean up their homepage (granted, they have a rather clean search-only page), add some missing features, and learn to be proactively innovative I’ll reevaluate my stance towards their search results.

Until then, Yahoo! is clearly the reigning champion. Congrats to the developers at Yahoo!. You guys have won over another dedicated user. Although I have one of the same complaints against your homepage as I do against MSN’s: Clutter. While not anywhere near the same hellacious MSN level, your site is definitely more cluttered than that of your Googleite counterparts. Still, you have a clear win in my tests.

Back to Mark’s blog now that we’ve established the same results. I have to agree that while Yahoo!’s results are superior, they still lack the “wow!” bits. I too have often wanted to get some detailed information about a webpage, such as the number of times it has come up in user searches, how relevant it is on average, how many websites link to it, etc. It would also be incredibly nice if they would work in a web-based bookmarks service. Simply check a box and click “Bookmark”, and it adds it to your user account. I know if either Yahoo! or Google did such, it would prove a very large bonus in my opinion.

All-in-all, I’m a bit disappointed that Google has fallen behind in the running, as I do prefer their simple, elegant layout, and their historically laid-back public-serving attitude. However, their services don’t integrate well, and given recent changes in their tactics, such as the controversial Google toolbar beta which supports an “autolink” feature that basically hijacks your current webpage to display relevant search results, I’m beginning to feel a tad more leery towards the future of this wonderful company. Could Yahoo! be making a comeback? Looks like it to me.