Maybe it is just the type of searches I run, but today I had yet another example of the lack of overlap at the major search engines. I was searching for more information about someone for whom I only had their AIM screen name. Searching that screen name at Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo! (although not in that order), I found one page, that actually had the information I wanted — the person’s name. The one page was found by only one of the six search engines. All the rest found zero results.
So which one was it? Not Google. I have another overlap analysis I’ve been working on in which Google also finds less than the others. Is Google clearing out infrequently found pages, minimizing its supplemental index, or just no longer pushing to keep up its database size and scope? I don’t know, but I thought I’d document another case in a screencast. Since I’m searching for someone’s AIM screen name, you’ll notice that I’ve blurred any parts that would show the actual screen name. This is a short screencast (01:06).
If the embedded version above does not work, try it direct at YouTube. And if you don’t want to watch to find out which search engine had the answer, it was Yahoo!.