Less Than 1 Percent Overlap in Major Search Engine First-Page Results

The major search engines deliver results that are dramatically different from one another’s, according to a study that evaluated search results from the four leading search engines, writes MarketingCharts. First page results on Google, Yahoo, Windows Live (MSN Search) and Ask (Ask Jeeves) overlap less than 1 percent, according to the study by metasearch engine Dogpile and InfoSpace, a developer of proprietary metasearch technologies.

Moreover, only 3.6 percent of the No. 1 ranked non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines for a given query, down from 7.0 percent in the July 2005 overlap study.

“Different Engines, Different Results: A Research Study by Dogpile.com” was conducted by researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Queensland University of Technology in April 2007.

The research conducted in April 2007 measured the overlap of first page search results from the four engines and found that only 0.6 percent of 776,435 first-page search results were the same across all four:

• 88.3 percent of total results were unique to one search engine.
• 8.9 percent of total results were shared by any two search engines.
• 2.2 percent percent of total results were shared by three search engines.
• 0.6 percentof total results were shared by the top four search engines.

Majority of all first-page results across top search engines are unique: on average…

• 69.6 percent of Google’s were unique to Google.
• 79.4 percent of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
• 80.1 percent of Liv’s were unique to Live.
• 75.0 percent Ask’s were unique to Ask.

More data from the study are available at MarketingCharts.