Search Engine Overlap and Divergence - Thumbshot Ranking, Cross-Search Engine Gauge

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One very interesting tool that allows anyone to see a visual mapping of search engine overlap is Thumbshot Ranking (http://ranking.thumbshots.com). You can compare the top 100 results in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, Teoma, Alltheweb, and Wisenut. It displays the results as one horizontal line of dots for each search, and the dots are connected by a blue line if they are identical. The site also lets you highlight a site of particular interest, perhaps your own. It shows all highlighted results and their links in red.

To illustrate the variation in search results, I did searches on the service. I compared Google and Yahoo! result sets for the most part. The first was a search for the term “seo,” and I set the search to highlight all links to seochat.com in red. Here are the results:

The dots on the far left are the top ranking results, and they decent as they move to the right. Since the left dot on the top row (Google) is red, you know SEO Chat is in Google’s top rank for that term. It didn’t do quite so well on Yahoo!, but still on the first page of SERPs. While the site may rank as number 1 on Google, it actually populates more of the higher results on Yahoo!. If you are optimizing, either is a good goal.

The web program also tells you how much overlap there are in those top 100 results. For the “seo” search, we saw 20% of the results were the same. That means the vast majority of results (80%) are unique to each search engine.

You can be sure “seo” is a keyword that many websites are fighting for. Most people would rather trust an SEO site or service that ranked well, since rank is their job. My point is that despite tons of optimization and competition, the search engines picked mostly different top results. Optimizing for one engine will not suffice, and different techniques may only add to ranking on one search or another.

As a side note to further demonstrate how Dogpile is not yet useful, let’s see this site’s rank on their engine. SEO Chat is on the first page of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search for the keyword “seo;” it appears in rank 12 for Ask Jeeves, the second page of results. It is common and highly ranked on all Dogpile sources, yet the site appears all the way down in Dogpile’s 69^th rank (as of 8/15/05). Even if every other page in the top 12 of all these search engines ranked better than SEO Chat, that would only put it at rank #44. The meta search simply fails at this stage of its development, and it is not functional for search engine users. Optimizing for it may not be entirely predictable either.

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