For many of us in the digital age, a search engine may seem as necessary as somewhere to live. All the information in the world is at our fingertips, which leaves us with a question: which search engine should I use? Most people already have a search engine that they default to, but many wonder if their favorite is really the best. So with this question in mind, I will compare three of the most popular search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. I will be comparing them in three different categories: speed, search result relevancy, and user interface.
The first category is speed. I conducted this test by using the internet speed test for download speed. Google came in at 41.3 mbps, Bing came in at 108.3 mbps, and Yahoo came in at 94.9 mbps. Bing won this one despite all three having very similar actual speeds. The difference comes from Google having significantly more users, search results, and experiences the most slowdown with multiple tabs. Yahoo and Bing, on the other hand, don’t have to worry as much about these issues.
Next is the search result relevancy test where I searched “hat for sale” with the intention of buying it from a major retailer. Google put the hats they were paid to advertise first with some strange results, but they followed with the locations of multiple stores at the mall where someone would go to buy a hat. The first actual website they linked was Lids, which is very relevant. Bing left much to be desired. They similarly had multiple ads before showing stores near me but followed that up with even more ads. Each of these ads took up more space than the ones on Google as well. Yahoo had multiple ads at the start before it showed three irrelevant results and then decided to show the same three ads again. Rinse and repeat until the middle of the second page where Walmart finally made an appearance, Google won this round.
Finally, there is user interface, which comes down to personal opinion. Google is simple and clean without much flair, Bing uses lots of fun infographics for many of their search results but is still just as easy to navigate as Google, which is surprising coming from Microsoft, who are notorious for their terrible UI design. Finally, Yahoo tried to emulate Google but did a much worse job.
