Data from search engine freshness analysis run on Aug. 13, 2001.

All search engines are pictures of the past, but which search engine has taken its picture most recently? This comparison tries to begin to answer that question.

This freshness showdown evaluated the search engines based on 12 searches for specific pages that Are updated daily And report that date The chart to the right shows how old the most recently refreshed pages were and the age of the most ancient page retrieved. All URLs analyzed showed the current date at the time of the test, but the search engines had all indexed older versions.

Search Engine Newest Page Found Oldest Page Found Google 1 day 52 days MSN (Inktomi) 6 days 144 days HotBot (Ink.) 9 days 144 days AllTheWeb 13 days 34 days Nor. Light 23 days 187 days AltaVista 39 days 138 days Teoma 90 days 143 days WiseNut 21 days 190 days

Details

The graph to the right shows the distribution of pages by date. Due to the non-random nature of the searches used and the small number of results, the points on the graph only give a broad, general idea of the age groupings of the databases.

More Stats Showdowns

See the Search Engine Statistics page for links to other search engine comparisons.