FOAK - search engines

UKRM(1) sure does lead to some interesting converations in our little
house, tonight was censoreship, this lead to China and then to Google (I
live with an academic)and ultimately to a straw poll of which search
engine is best for what. Now my argument would be that Yahoo and Google
must be within maybe 20% for the number of hits returned per search
however this does not appear to be the case:

Everday life they are fairly even.
Destruction war etc Google is up by maybe 20%.
Porn shows Yahoo giving double the hits.

No doubt our test was very flawed with considerations like cached pages,
refreshes and lots of other factors not being taken into account, however
there is no doubting that Yahoo gives morer hits for the seedier side of
life, so I guess my ultimate question is how censored is Google even in
the Western world?

(1) This time without the SO using the cnut word.

 

More reading here:

http://www.google-watch.org

 

Did you have Google SafeSearch set to strict, moderate or off for this
test?

http://www.google.com/safesearch_help.html

 

They may have some very compelling arguments [1] but when they're
presented like this: "Extra evil inserted into [the Google] toolbar", it
does have the whiff of non toxic green wax crayon about it.


[1] Having read some of the stuff I'm yet to be convinced.

 

It's written for an american audience primarily.

There's very little written that I agree with completely, but there are
some useful nuggets in there.

 

well, if you compare apples and oranges, your results are going to be
"interesting".

 

Don't forget Google doesn't count 'similar pages' unless you tell it to
by clicking the link on the last page of results. For example a google
for "muddystuff.co.uk" gives "about 5,390" pages, but if you go to the
last one & click the "repeat the search with the omitted results
included" link it jumps to "about 8,800" pages.