Friday, September 02, 2005

How do you compare?

Dogpile has a really interesting Search Engine Comparison tool that allows you to compare the top 10 results on your search term from Google, Yahoo and MSN in a visual overlapped pie graph.

Its so interesting to me that there is not a whole hell of a lot of overlap here. Each search engine seems to have an almost entirely unique set of results (for my company url at least). It brought to light the whole issue of the catch-22 nature of the internet: one one hand is fantastic to have so many people, all over the world (companies, people, individuals) putting up anything and everything and allowing us all to benefit from it, learn from it, buy off it, etc, but on the flipside, is there *ever* going to be any sort of regulation and would that regulation be a good thing?

I mean, we all spend hours trying to get our sites up in the page rankings and though there are some tried and true methods, I'm sure most have us have experienced the phenomenon of getting great results with one search engine and some not so hot ones on another.

The browser issue is also hella annoying for me. It never occurred to me (until we had to build our own website) that it would look (sometimes) very different across all browsers. Just when we fix something with one browser, something shows up on another.

I'm all for freedom of expression and lettin' things work themselves out, but would a little bit of regulation be so horrible?

I don't know, myself. Just wondering...

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