Ask About The Best Online Search Engine

I brainstormed quite a bit about the best approach to this post. There are so many search engines out there in cyberspace. I have used all the four major search engines mentioned below.

Some are obviously more visible, popular, or useful than others. So, narrowing the list of search engines down to just four of the best was not an easy task at all.

Looking at the four tabs on my browser, I could just see how each one tried to outdo the other in self-promotion. The following description was what I saw on my screen.

‘Ask.com Search Engine – Better Web Search’ said it all without a fancy logo, except for the Internet-wide standard image of a blank page, while ‘Google’, the legendary search engine giant with a gift of the gab, humbly let only its usual squared blue big-G logo speak for itself.

On the other hand, ‘Yahoo! Search – Web Search’ simply spells functionality with its normal red-Y! logo and ‘Live Search’ is how MSN simply describes its own attributes.

As I clicked on each tab to see what lay there, I was reminded of the similarity to a car aficionado looking under the hood of four high-performance sports cars.

Ask.com appeared very sleek, really slick and well designed – I could see the racetrack pedigree almost bursting at the highly polished seams.

Google showed why it was still the great marque to beat, while Yahoo seemed to give a promise of the thrill of a wild mustang ride.

On a relatively positive note, the MSN search engine layout gave me the impression that looks could be deceiving.

Then, an idea came to me. I had seen the beauty but the brains needed to be tested. Why not take each out for a spin and then compare the results, I seemed to ask myself?

Do you remember the Fairy Tale in which the legendary question asked was: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Please tell me, if you can recall the name!

Any way, I decided to pose just four questions or search terms to each of the four search engines and to see what would be the result. The queries were based on my past experience with search engine results, common sense, and the need to inject more fun into this post.

Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? The four simple inquiries were as follows: ‘best search engine’, ‘worst search engine’, ‘most popular search engine’, and ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’

Now, all the results are in – drum rolls in the background, please! Just to be sure personally, I throttled the following additional stumper searches on each of the still revving software engines: ‘Blog Battle Royale’, ‘country profiles’, ‘Bronx’, and ‘Philately’.

The topmost ranking search engine results were selected – you can replicate the searches for yourself, if you have the time. I had my proof, all what I needed to make my decision.

And, the winner is, by a margin of uncanny shrewdness... Ask.com. Need you have asked?

UPDATE - Wednesday, September 26, 2007:

For those who may misunderstand this rather subtle post, please note the following:

1. Ask.com is shrewd because it sponsored this post as an entry in PayPerPost's Blog Battle Royale II competition.

2. Ask.com will benefit from this post because, when it does the 8 searches indicated, it would find some lapses in its search results that need to be fixed in order to compete with the other search engines.

3. Ask.com was the only search engine that had no PPP BBR, I or II, in its search results.

4. If this post bored you, please forgive me - or, take an aspirin or something stronger. ;-)

The real search results are out - Added Thursday, October 04, 2007.