The four engines I'm referring to are Google, Yahoo Search, Bing, and Ask.com. It's good to have all these different engines in
some specific situations. Some of these
some specific situations are
- When one wants to discover new Web content (using the same query)
- When one is doing research on a particular topic
- When one is looking for some rare information
In case (1), having multiple search engines is particularly helpful. To understand this, remember that in some situations, the sum of first
SERP of each of the four engines can be more useful than the sum of the first 4 result-pages of Google (this observation, in fact, is the very premise of
metasearch engines). For a query entered by a user, Google has its particular
defintion of what it thinks is
relevant for that query (this definition is governed by Google's algorithms). Although Google's definition serves the world well (as
its market-share and
its consumer-satisfaction numbers show), it's likely that in
some specific situations, a user may actually be looking for
alternative definitions of "relevant", something that only a different search-engine can provide. The same query entered into each of the top 4 search engines brings up results of a different
type. And this different perspective is what I like/want sometimes.
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