Study Puts Yahoo and Google in a Tie for Relevance, but they both fail miserably

[regic]

... the study...concerns the ranking of the different search engines according to relevance – or at least relevance as perceived by a panel of users...

Three American search engines were chosen for this study, Google, Yahoo and MSN, along with three French ones, Exalead, Voilà (developed by France Telecom and available on the Wanado web portal) and Dir.com...

Google and Yahoo tied for first place, with a rating of 2.3, but the most striking result is undoubtedly the extremely low level of user satisfaction. None of the search engines even passed (2.5 out of 5) and some of the grades were extremely low (1.2 for Voilà). Links graded as 0 (totally useless) were astonishingly numerous: 53.1% for Voilà, but even the best didn’t do much better: 28.6% for Google and 27.7% for Yahoo. Conversely, results graded as 5 (excellent) failed to reach even 16% for the top two search engines.

full article: http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2006/03/searc...er-is.html
download the full study here (.pdf format): http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/veronis/pdf/20...-study.pdf

[jezebel]

they both fail miserably

Links graded as 0 (totally useless) were astonishingly numerous

Relevance doesn't mean shit if they can't control the spam.