Data from search engine freshness analysis run on April 4, 2002.

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 68 days MSN (Inktomi) 1 day 80 days HotBot (Ink.) 1 day 136 days AltaVista 12 days 51 days AllTheWeb 16 days 191 days Teoma 54 days 167 days NLResearch 49 days 187 days WiseNut 247 days 286 days

Details

The graph to the right shows the distribution of pages by date. WiseNut is not included because it was so old, with most pages from July 2001, that it would be way off the bottom of the graph.

Also, 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.

Past Freshness Showdowns

• March 7, 2002
  Newest: Google, MSN, HotBot
  Oldest: WiseNut
• August 13, 2001
  Newest: Google
  Oldest: WiseNut, Northern Light

More Stats Showdowns

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

See my article for more about freshness of search engines:

"Freshness Issue and Complexities with Web Search Engines." ONLINE 25(6): 66-68, Nov.-Dec. 2001.