Think most search engines deliver similar results? Think again. Today’s SearchEngineWatch reports on a new study that compared Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo, and found that the average overlap in their first-page results was just 1.1 percent. The survey found that 84.9 percent of all results were unique to a single search engine. Says SearchEngineWatch associate editor Chris Sherman:
“The implications of these findings are significant for both searchers and marketers. Searchers relying on a single search engine are missing a vast swath of web content that they could easily find simply by trying their queries on other engines. And marketers targeting a single search engine in their optimization efforts are effectively abandoning a potentially huge amount of traffic from other sources.”