Google fares better than Yahoo and MSN in Trivial Pursuit challenge |
Loading ...Michael Liedtke from the Seattle PI gathered up some questions from the game Trivial Pursuit in various categories and pitted five search engines against each other to answer the questions: ask.com (Ask Jeeves), answers.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN. The test found answers.com and ask.com a “small step ahead” of Google and “noticeably smarter” than Yahoo and MSN. 
The Internet’s most popular search engine came up with the correct answer on the first link in eight of the 20 questions (including the one about tektites). That’s something Yahoo did just five times and MSN only twice.
The test required that the answer was in the first three pages of results. I suck at Trivial Pursuit. Anybody here good at that game?
I have won Trivial Pursuit on my first turn. How you say? I have a very refined ability to associate ideas or facts. Trivial Pursuit is about deducing the correct answer from the clue or recalling cold facts from memory. Every one of those ‘Memory Masters’ programs or systems teaches people how to make associations so each fact is now woven into a fabric that interconnects the ideas and makes them easier to recall at will. Kind of like a mnemonic device like Roy G. Biv uses to remember the rainbow colors in prism order.
It is not surprising that Yahoo! did not come in first since it is a directory/portal that provides queries as to content essentially it is category driven. Yahoo! has implemented some associations through cross-referencing, but generally will produce refined lists better than obscure facts. Like a list of barbers in the southern part of Utah that are open on Saturdays.
Google is an associative since that is what drives the contextual advertising that pays the bills. Unfortunately it is massive and therefore designed to sacrifice accuracy or obscurity for speed. It is just not possible to search the entire database and provide results in 2.47 sec as it will note after each search run. Google will find the correct site in the first three listings almost every time. If…and here is the rub…the query is structured in a format that will exploit google’s strengths, than accuracy goes off the chart. Every search engine has this inherent flaw so using the advanced search which guide the user into providing the data in each engines preferred format will always produce substantial more focused results. As in much of life ‘garbage in = garbage out’ rules all searches. If you can’t describe what you want how can the search ever find it?
I prefer for a vast sweep of the Internet to use Copernic Agent (basic version is fine & free) www.copernic.com because is runs my query at up to 15 different search engines and then compares the results and produces a consensus list from the results which is ranked, then sorted by relevance. If the same site comes up in the top three choices at every engine; then it probably has something to do with what you want. Call it searching by polling several experts, but not the leading experts because google and Yahoo! are not participants.
Throw in that it operates as a free-standing program so I never hassle with going back to my search page with easy to use drill-down or refinement tools and finding obscurity on the net becomes easy. Or can integrate into Internet explorer or search meta data on the fly and it is one specialized tool that I have shared with friends for ten years.
If all that sounds to overwhelming I would bet that A9 Amazon’s search engine would be my engine of choice to kick trivial pursuit’s ass. It matches modified google results with user chosen categories to refine any broad search using Yahoo! like principles. It will also remember all previous searches so when I accidentally close the browser that I needed to use to go back to a results page two days later and see the exact query I ran in my diary of searches.
Ultimately users need to decide if the use of natural language questioning like those preferred by ask.com and askjeeves.com is something desirable. How often do you actually want to ask a specific question and can’t break it into keywords so a google or yahoo search can be effective. Hell type in the whole question in either because they ignore common words anyways. Americans were not so lazy that we needed a one-stop, one-button, idiot proof solution then we might actually appreciate the various search tools available.
HHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Comment by J Ramsay — June 27, 2005 @ 12:17 am PST