Everyone I know, including myself, uses Google to search the Internet. It’s clean, easy to use and it almost always gives me what I’m looking for.
Lots of other people agree. The Mountain View, Calif., company accounted for 57 percent of all Internet searches in the U.S. in August, according to research firm comScore.
Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the second and third most popular search firms, want to change that. They’ve recently revamped their search engines in an attempt to cut into Google’s lead.
The key for any search engine is giving users what they want in as few searches as possible. Search engines have gone from returning exactly what you requested to returning results that they think you want.
For instance, typing in an address on most search engines today will give you a map of that location even though you didn’t put the word “map” in your query.
To see how the new offerings stack up, I ran several queries through Yahoo Search (yahoo.com), Microsoft’s Live Search (live.com), and Google (google.com).
Yahoo’s search engine was the best at providing information about a broad topic.
When I searched for information about lactose intolerance, Yahoo offered a shortcut to articles about symptoms and treatments as well as newspaper articles about the condition.
Google is still the best for searching for specific, arcane information. Recently, I was unsure of a charge that appeared on my credit card.
So I searched Google for the name of the charge as it appeared on my statement.
Google returned links to three different posts on forums where others had gotten the same charge and explained what it was.
Yahoo returned two links, both of which had nothing to do with the charge and appeared to be spam sites. Live Search brought back two of the three forum links that Google did.
If you frequently search for information about concepts or broad topics, Yahoo is best, as it provides lots of help, especially when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.
It also offers many handy shortcuts for searches on topics such as shopping or hotels.
But keep in mind that choosing a search engine is not like choosing a spouse. You can pick more than one.
