Data from search engine freshness analysis run on March 7, 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 6 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 40 days MSN (Inktomi) 1 day 194 days HotBot (Ink.) 1 day 169 days AllTheWeb 16 days 163 days AltaVista 32 days 145 days NLResearch 35 days 159 days Teoma 61 days 146 days WiseNut 219 days 258 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

• 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.