Needle in a Blogstack!

My Dog Ate My Website! a photo by FindYourSearch on Flickr.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been a devoted Google user for a few years now. When Microsoft first came out with Bing, I had already heard the rumors about their own people using Google over their Microsoft search engine. The new search engine, Bing, was suppose to be better, so I tried it. I hated it. I could never find what I was looking for. I kept with Google and avoided Bing.

However, for this project I decided to take another look. I did two different keyword searches using Google, Bing, and Technorati. I did not use any librarian friendly booleans in my search and just typed in my keywords sans quotes (just like how one of our patrons might do it). Here are the results of those searches

Multicultural Storytime
Google 114,000
Bing 54,300
Technorati 1

Recycled Crafts
Google 3,600,000
Bing 5,290,000
Technorati 41

Surprisingly, there really wasn't much difference between Google and Bing as far as web search results went. I did, however, prefer Google's formats that image and video search results were presented in. Google gave me information along with the video thumbnails, whereas Bing only gave me the thumbnails. Technorati was the dark horse because it was only searching blogs. Well, to be honest, for a lot of my searches that is exactly what I am looking for. Most of the time when I do a web search it is not just to see what another library or group is doing for their programming, but also what they did and how they did it. Because of that, I spend a lot of time reading library, book, crafting and other types of blogs. Using traditional search engines means a lot of weeding through the muck to find what I need. In fact, a lot of the blogs I follow have been found because they follow the same blogs that I do (i.e. Social Networking at its best!). Using Technorati provides a shortcut around all that.

I think I have found a new favorite site. ;)