Last week at SMX Advanced apparently Danny Sullivan pulled a quick one on the search engines. In front of a crowd Sullivan tested the relevancy of search engine results on various search engines. First search engine to be tested was Google. The keyword: “search engines”. The question: where does Google (the most used search engine) rank in their own results. The answer (tested by me on 6/9/09): position 32! Hmm scary to know that the most used search engine, Google, doesn’t rank on the first page of their own results. Sullivan went on to test other search engines and found similar results. Hearing about Sullivan’s test prompted me to further that test to see how a few other search engines performed on the term “search engines” both on their own site and on other search engines. Here’s what I found:

Rank of the search engine on the tested search engine

Keyword:        Search Engines Google Bing Yahoo! Ask Cuil AOL AltaVista SearchMe
Tested Search Engine Google

32

11

14

3

2

Bing

19

8

6

73

38

2

Yahoo!

2

11

1

10

13

43

4

Ask

18

16

49

1

30

13

8
Cuil

AOL

29

11

18

3

2

AltaVista

2

11

1

10

13

43

4

SearchMe

5

6

4

7

1

How To Read The Results:

  • Example 1: Google ranked 32 on Google, Google ranked 19 on Bing, etc
  • Example 2: Bing ranked 11 on Google, Bing did not rank in the top 100 on Bing, etc
  • Blank cells indicate that that search engine did not have a ranking within the top 100 positions on the correlating search engine.

Now that you have the results, it’s up to you which search engine you choose to use.  Happy searching!

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