My digital garage

Just the other day, Jonathan Strickland wrote about Google’s Caffeine, and if you missed it, the American search giant is trying to redefine the way it crawls the Web, indexes pages and ranks search results. As Jonathan pointed out, some think that Caffeine is a response to Microsoft Bing, but even as fast as Google moves, it still couldn’t rush a brand new search system to market that quickly. I mean, it was no secret that Microsoft was working to replace Live Search, but similarities between the two systems are likely to be fairly coincidental, unless there was some serious leaking of proprietary information going on.

But why would Google have been working on a new way to rank pages in search? Google’s lead may seem commanding — 65 percent to a combined 28 percent for Yahoo and Microsoft, as The New York Times’ Miguel Helft pointed out — but that’s not the whole story. Helft wrote that ComScore, an organization that tracks online behavior, ranks searcher penetration for Google at 84 percent, to Microsoft/Yahoo’s combined 73 percent. Basically, this says that people use more than one search engine when they work, and apparently people use Google, Yahoo and Microsoft together.

Why bother? It matters. You get different results depending on which you use. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet wrote about a comparison made by Search Engine Land between Caffeine with regular Google. Video and news results ranked in the middle and lower on the page with the Caffeinated search, when they lurked near the top on the current Google search results page. And on Bing? Foley compared Caffeine to Bing and found that Microsoft’s new decision engine didn’t put any news or blog results at all on the front page. Images and videos ranked near the top. It’s a completely different experience altogether.

Now that I’ve had the opportunity to try Bing, I like it. I also like other search engines and use metasearch engines that aggregate search results from many engines. It’s good to mix things up a bit. I think the winner of the search engine wars is you, because you get to reap the benefits of their competition to be the best.