Google Blogoscoped

Monday, October 3, 2005

Search Engine Freshness

A report on The Freshness of Web search engines’ databases [PDF] (by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor of the Department of Information Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany) measured the frequency in which search engines update their indices. 38 different German web sites with daily updates were watched over six weeks in Google.de, MSN.de, and Yahoo.de. From the study’s abstract:

“We find that Google performs best overall with the most pages updated on a daily basis, but only MSN is able to update all pages within a time-span of less than 20 days. Both other engines have outliers that are quite older. In terms of indexing patterns, we find different approaches at the different engines: While MSN shows clear update patterns, Google shows some outliers and the update process of the Yahoo index seems to be quite chaotic. Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and not only one engine should be used when searching for current content.”

[Via Abakus.]

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!