King Of Search Engine:

Google: Google is the reigning king of search engines-nothing groundbreaking there. Not only is its current market share approximately 65 percent, but it is currently the only search engine whose name has been recognized as an actual verb in English language. Spider tested the search engine and its features to see what makes it number one. However, with the updates being introduced in the engine at an impressive rate, it is quite possible that more features are added by the time this review it’s published.

Presentation and Features: “Less is more” seems to be the philosophy behind Google’s minimalistic homepage, with its various features neatly tucked away. For those who prefer a bit of zing, a neat button at the bottom left provides the option to change the background image for the search engine. Unlike Bing, the advanced search button is present on the homepage, giving user the option to specify search conditions beforehand. Upon searching a query, results accumulated from different categories are displayed in the main page. Apart from the regular categories such as Web, Videos, Images etcetera, Google also includes Updates that not only provide second by second real time updates (From Twitter) related to the entered query, but also includes its timeline, from where you can get results from a specific date, minute and second.

The customization/filtering features available for each category are extremely elaborate. A few filtering features that completely bowled us over were “Translated search” in Web (Where you can get search results from different languages translated in English/default language), ‘closed captioned in Videos (Retrieving results with only captions), ‘custom location’ in Updates (restricting the Twitter feeds to a specific region), ‘ custom range’ in Books (Specifying the publishing time period of the book searched) and of course the ‘ wonder wheel’ in Web which provides a funky, illustrative way to show related information.

Searching at the speed of thought-this is what Google’s new predictive search feature, Google instant, is all about. Google instant basically modifies results as you type the characters, and combined with the search suggestions that it provides, it saves you from the hassle of tediously typing in the entire keyword.

Search Performance: While Google outranked Bing for the most part, the results were not their ups and downs. Although our basic search tests saw Google score two perfect results out of five, Google’s database searches performed poorly comparison, with only one exception. Acknowledging that some of our test expressions were particularly grueling, however, the database searches functioned well within their parameters. Search results were mostly spot on within top four items on the page if not the whole. The veteran search engine also excelled at vague searches and semantic searches, presenting results and exceptional accuracy and relevance, thanks to its skilful data extraction ability. Querying variations of certain expressions-using synonyms or natural language construction-also returned steady results. The inclusion of Google Squared in Search engine results pages (SERPs) allows them to offer direct answers in addition to detailed results, and works well with semantic search presentation.

It also seemed to us that, where proximity relevance was concerned, Google had an unfair advantage over Bing, Users from Pakistan are automatically directed to the .pk ccTLD Google page, which priorities results for Pakistan, where as Bing is yet to have Pakistan on its list of countries. In any case, local search results are further elevated by clicking the “Pages from Pakistan” option to the left of the results listed. On average, Google also returned results 65.5 percent faster than Bing, at a speed of 40 milliseconds during the tests. There are big numbers, but it is generally a matter of less than a second’s difference and really only notable on internet connections slower than 512kbps.