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Search Engine Statistics: Freshness Showdown

Data from Oct. 20, 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 5 searches (with 13-24 matches per search engine) 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 Rough Average Oldest Page Found Google 1 day 1 month 53 days MSN (Ink.) 1 day 2 weeks 36 days HotBot (Ink.) 1 day 2 weeks 59 days AltaVista 1 days 3 months 112 days AlltheWeb 5 days 3 weeks 390 days* Gigablast 6 days 4 months 172 days Openfind 50 days 1 year 682 days Teoma 116 days 4 months 170 days WiseNut 148 days 5 months 170 days NLResearch 201 days 10 months 365 days

* On one search AlltheWeb found several surprisingly old records (Sept. 25, 2001, Feb. 25, 2002, and April 15, 2002). If these were not included, AlltheWeb's oldest would only be 36 days old.

Details

The graph below shows the distribution of pages by date. NLResearch is not included because it was so old, with most pages from late 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

• April 4, 2002
  Newest: Google, MSN, HotBot, AltaVista
  Oldest: WiseNut
• 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.