Multiple Engines Not Magic

Yesterday I did one search with multiple search engines with less than stellar results.

The research term I used was– micropropagation peony - . I brought up each of the six search engines in a separate instance of Firefox and then followed links to tabs on that instance. This allowed me to go back and review the results from each engine and do a quick easy count/comparison.

The first two pages or twenty results on google yielded thirteen likely looking pages.

Went to yahoo and the first page or ten results yielded two good unique pages.

Ask.com first page had no new, unique results.

Dmoz had zero returns.

WindowsLive in the first page of results there was one unique non useful result.

Clusty.com had one unique and interesting result on the second page. The clusters listed in the left column looked interesting so I followed up with them. The links mostly lead to spam pages and link farms. Idea looks interesting, I will check out the clusters with other topics and see if I get better results.

I will do more trial comparisons this coming week. The comparing takes a bit of time. I need to also try going through the five lesser engines and opening any likely links without taking the time to tally every thing up. Might give a feel for whether quick run through of the lesser five are worth spending a little time on.