An Empirical Evaluation of Clusty, Ice Rocket, Google, MSN and Yahoo
T-Salon calls Clusty "A Search Engine That Doesn't Censor Its Results." As a user of search engine, I would suggest that people pay more attention to performance characteristics. Political correctness is nice, but what if you cannot get the most useful results? You should know what (if anything) you are missing.
Now, you can go through your subject area of interest, identify the key facts, events and people and then compare the search engines. This is what should matter to you materially.
The empirical evaluation done by me here is simple and egocentric. First, I type in the name of the blog "EastSouthWestNorth." Clusty returned 19,668 results, Ice Rocket 240,000 results, Google 240,000 results, MSN 19,594 results and Yahoo 218,000 results. This does not mean much because most of the additional Ice Rocket, Google and Yahoo results could be from spamblogs. That is something that I have always known.
Next, I am going to look at a bunch of keywords that have driven and will continue to drive people to EastSouthWestNorth through search engines. For me (and I believe for my users as well), it would be a bad thing if Clusty does not deliver them here. Google ranks the EastSouthWestNorth pages highly because (1) this is an authoritative website based upon the total number of incoming links (see the preceding paragraph) and (2) there are many links coming into the particular pages containing the keywords.
Here are the politically sensitive issues:
For some non-political issues:
For these twenty items, the average Clusty rank is 6.7, average Ice Rocket rank is 4.55, average Google rank is 2.75, average MSN rank is 1.2 and average Yahoo rank is 5.0. So EastSouthWestNorth would be slightly better off under MSN (and Google plus Yahoo except for the Qian Zhoushu item in which it returned a lot of booksellers), but it is not as if something was completely missing from anyone. As far as the EastSouthWestNorth blog is concerned, Clusty and Ice Rocket are in the same class as Google, MSN and Yahoo in terms of performance. Ice Rocket is annoying because the top result is usually a paid advertisement (e.g. "Roland Soong" returned the top result of "Song of Roland" at Amazon.com and "Lu Banglie," "Lu Xuesong" and "Lu Yuegang" all returned the top result on Lucent stocks). Of course, Michael Anti may have a different opinion because his biggest fan site is ranked far too low by Clusty.