Wednesday 17 August 2011

cacharro22: Meta-Searching Meta-Hither and Meta-Tither

It's quite interesting that of the entire internet, the main search engines return near uniform results. The major differences in the results for my searches were that Bing gave me more foreign language pages and that Ask, and other search engines, promoted retail websites.

I know that google has a habit of tailoring search results to our history so I was wondering whether the meta-search engines take that into account, whether they use a generic google, or whether their google output is based on their own history.

I will still use google because I can play with the settings with more ease to fine tune my results.
 
Cool extra thing:
I now have a resource to answer this perennial question.

2 comments:

  1. And you should try different google domain searches i.e. google.co.uk wil get different results than the spanish google. You will get different results if logged in with your account and when not logged in as well.
    Interesting that Bing gave you stuff you wanted which wasn't on google though

    Rowena 23 Things Team

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  2. I have tried different domains in google before but it used to revert to google.co.uk but a google.es search worked and gave me great results entirely in Spanish. Perhaps this is new or I mis-remeber it.
    I think Bing only gave me what I wanted because I speak Spanish; I made a mental note to avoid it for languages I don't understand. Now I will use a google.es domain for Spanish searches though.
    I also noticed that google.es also comes in Catalan, Galician, and Basque flavours!

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