Search Engine Overlap and Divergence - Looking at Search Engine Divergence
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To searchers, the results simply mean if you didn’t find what you are looking for in the first few pages or SERPs move to another engine rather than digging down into lower less-relevant pages. This does not mean meta searches are useful, as you will read on following pages. Meta searches may eventually become much more useful gives some development.
To optimizers, the news should mean more. You should already know that not everyone uses Google. Studies show users spread out over many search engines. Just over a third of searches are Googled, 35%. Yahoo! accounts for 28% of searches. AOL and MSN follow with 16% and 15% respectively. All others make up 6% of the search market. (figures from SearchEngineWatch.com)
By only optimizing for Google, you miss out on 65% of the search market. That’s not a pretty thing to think about. That’s the majority of web traffic. The search engines don’t really cater to definitive demographics, so demographics shouldn’t even be an excuse.
Still shouldn’t optimizing a page for one search engine show all sear engines it is relevant? Are search engines flawed? The purpose of a search engine is to deliver the most relevant content on the internet. To any one particular search, this means there are 10 sites out there that should end up at the top of the results pages, right? Well, it seems none of the search engines really agree on top 10s, and don’t often have much consensus on top 100s either. So does this mean search engines have failed to deliver the right content to us?
As some of the top search engines prove, there can be multiple right answers. To begin, all search engines have different sites indexed that can be searched through. The portion of the internet they scour differs, though it also overlaps in places. They are pulling from different databases, but they are also pulling with different search algorithms. The algorithms are the “brains” of the search that decide what kinds of results a search should receive. How algorithms determine what information you want and provide it is a long discussion for another article. Suffice it to say, even different search results can provide equally relevant sites. Also, when some users search “mustang,” they may expect a car or construction equipment or a horse; search engines can only guess.
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