What's in a vanity search...or why are the numbers so far off....

My friend Robert Scoble and I were talking the other day. Ultimately the conversation turned to that famous guy top, i.e. “who’s bigger”…as in whose ego?, nah, but rather as in who’s got more listings of their name at Google.

I was fascinated by the fact that I could type my name at Google, enclose it in “quote marks”, i.e. “Buzz Bruggeman”, and Google would come back with  24,100 mentions in less than .23 seconds! This made for a great parlor trick, and one when I was pitching ActiveWords always dazzled those in attendance.(Frankly it dazzled me too!)

Not to be out done, Scoble showed me that he’s 20 times more important at Google than I am, weighing in at 499,000 mentions in less than .18 seconds! (Wow, I thought I am impressed!) I knew he was on a roll, but this is a lot.

My next step in this Sherlockian exercise was to try MSN..search. And whammo, MSN came back with 4,079 results in less than .20 seconds! Scoble weighed in at 71,267 results in less than .13 seconds.

When I got to the MSN Search Champs event, I found an opportunity in the Q&A, raised my hand and asked, “How come, as in how come if you guys, i.e. MSN have this great search crawler technology are the numbers so different? I mean, as in further, I know that Scoble is famous, but why the differences?”

I didn’t really get any very good answers, but I knew that it was somewhat unlikely that there were 4,079 mentions of my name on the Web, let alone 24,100.

About a day later, one of the smart guys working on the search team grabbed me over lunch and said look at this….

On Google, when we get to this page, you find that Google either doesn’t have or doesn’t choose to reveal more than 1,000 results. When I did the same exercise with MSN, they had or chose to reveal about 509 results, approximately half of what Google returned.

So, is there a method to this madness? The cynic in me says there is, and here’s how it might work:

1. Someone shows you a vanity search on Google, i.e. how many times is my/your name listed?

2. The results show a lot, and you are amazed!

3. You then show off this little parlor trick to your friends, and while you are amazed, they are even more amazed! Further you figure that as a result of the appearance that Google’s search must be a lot deeper and better….and…

4. Because you are the geek in the group, and because you either know or ought to know what you are doing, they are impressed, and they figure that if the results are this different;

5. And both of you tend to use the search engine that brings back the greatest number of results, assuming that quantity always equals quality.

Hence Google wins the battle of the egos, and gets a lot more mindshare!

I plan to ask a friend at Google the classic question, i.e. “what’s up with this?”, but for the moment I am beginning to think that both Scoble and I have drunk too much of our own Kool-Aid, and the numbers on either engine aren’t quite as real as we would like them to be!“ My take is that the MSN numbers are beginning to look a lot more like reality.

Another friend of mine opined recently that Google was doing a great job of portraying themselves as a more trustworthy company. I hadn’t even thought about this point. Maybe they are or maybe they aren’t, one would never be able to tell from the numbers above, but one would be able to tell, that what you see isn’t really what you get!

Go through this exercise, and I would be curios as to what you might come up with?

Comments

[Steve Pavlina]

My SE ego is just slightly bigger than yours, Buzz, but a lot less than Scoble's.

For "Steve Pavlina" (in quotes) I get 24,200 on Google and 7,187 on MSN. Most of the top results are references to my articles or blog entries.

[Michael Moncur]

Wow, I get 133,000 in Google (but I guess I'm no Scoble) and 18,000 at MSN. It seems like MSN has less results in general for most queries - not necessarily a bad thing.

[Marc Orchant]

Buzz: I just posted my take on this and, as I told you at Search Champs, it's all smoke and mirrors IMO. I added Yahoo! to the mix just to make it even more interesting.

[Terry Porter]

I got 36,000 on Google and 14,000 on MSN. Of course, I share a name with a former NBA player, so most of those references are to him. Which is one of the problems with ego searching...

[Paul]

Hi Buzz,

Mine is 1.210 in Google and 871 in MSN ...i have to age a bit more :-)

There is a nice website for egosurfing and test your populairity:

http://www.preople.com

Goodluck!!
Paul Aelen (that's one result more now, thxs!)

[Antoin O Lachtnain]

Try and think about this. The number you get for occurrences is an _estimate_. It's based on a survey of some sort of subset of pages or indices. They do exactly what pollsters do - they infer from the survey data to the population at large. So, if they survey 1 million pages and find 5 occurrences, and they know that there are around 1 billion pages on the web, then they infer that there must be around 5000 occurrences of your name.

The problem with this survey is that the sample probably isn't really representative. They are overindexing certain types of pages, probably pages that are frequently linked to.

Google (or the other search engines) are designed for searching, not textual analysis. The numbers they throw up are just supposed to give you some context, not to be accurate. There isn't much point in trying to rate search engines on this criterion.

On the other hand, maybe there is a need for an Internet textual analysis system to allow accurate egosurfing. Who knows?

[Nicole Simon]

13900 / 6548 - and I throw in another figure: 36600, Yahoo. :o) But of course, this does not count as Buzz name, because that one is special.

I love the fact that I don't need a special domain name any more, but people can throw in my name and will always get a contact to me first. I'm working at Nicole ;)

As for the numbers, I think I remember that google did only show results with a certain pagerank in them but then again - does it really matter? I don't mind that Yahoo has the most hit, Google gives me most of the time the results I was looking for - the others not.

And as long as I can't set the search enginge to search the database I want it to (especially MSN Search is 'great' in mixing german results in it with a higher rank), Google stays as the least annoying of those three.

But the vanity search thing is another reason to go out and look before you name a product - because it makes it easier for you to show people that you are talked about and for people to find your product. :)

[Tim Bray]

Part of the answer is here: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort

[Brandon Paddock]

I guess I'm the only one who gets more results on MSN? Awfully strange, that is.

[Denis de Bernardy]

Some search engine results are in aggregate form. e.g. if your name is mentionned several times on the same web site, engines such as Google return two entries, one of which is indented and followed by a 'more results from [site]' link.

[Chris Hammond]

I'm just adding a post so that my name shows up on google one more time ;)

[Terry Porter]

The buzzword of the day today is narcissurfing: Googling yourself to see where, when, and how many times your name comes up. www.buzzwhack.com

This is the first time I have ever commented twice on a blog. Which makes another entry for me and not the NBA guy I guess...