Search Engine Freshness

An interesting preprint of an article to appear in the Journal of Information Science is The Freshness of Web Search Engines’ Databases by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig, and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor. Their research evaluates the freshness of the databases at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search in early 2005. It is a long article, so to quote part of the summary "even pages that are updated daily can reach a very low update frequency in Google as well as in Yahoo. From the results of our study, we can assume that MSN updates its whole index more frequently than its competitors." Also note the following from their abstract: "Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and not only one engine should be used when searching for current content."