February 2007 Archive

Conflicting Overlap

I seem to be on a roll lately in finding Web pages that are not indexed by Google and are only found by one search engine. Yesterday I was exploring LibraryThing, a social networking and book cataloging site. I became curious as to how well the search engines covered the personal pages that people create in a social networking site like LibraryThing. So I took a look at two user profiles, grabbed a unique-looking phrase from the profile page and checked to see which, if any, of the main Web search engines could find it. Each page was found by only one search engine, but it was not the same one!

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Page Found at 3 or 6: Not Google

While working on an upcoming presentation, I came across a Web page that I could not find on Google. The page has been at that URL, on a Canadian academic, site since at least 2003. I was rather surprised to not find it there, so I decided to try a quick overlap showdown. The comparison showed that it was indexed by Yahoo!, Gigablast, and Exalead, but it was not found by Google, Live, or Ask.

So here's another screencast showing the lack of overlap between search engines. This is a short screencast (01:30).

If the embedded version above does not work, try it direct at YouTube.

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