Google, Yahoo! or Windows Live?

This isn’t really to do with SEO much apart from the fact that you do SEO for these Search Engines, but its interesting to know which of these 3 main search engines actually perform the best, and in the end, provide the best results for the users.

Google
Google has been the most popular out of the three search engines for quite some time now, and the main reason is because of the number of services that they provide, as well as being a Search Engine. Subsites such as Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Google Analytics etc… bring in a lot of traffic for Google, and since they have a big-sized budget, no competitor can get even close to them. They just keep getting bigger and bigger!

Now, in terms of results, they provide decent results. For some sites they update regularly such as with blog posts which can be indexed in 10 minutes, whereas for some websites, they never index at all. They are also the strictest Search Engine of the three, because you can be lowered in the results or even de-indexed for small petty things that you choose to do. Also, they update the results that regularly that one day you may be top, and the next day you may be on Page 2 or Page 3. That may be good in some peoples eyes, but for some it can be frustrating when their site is lowered and because of this, their traffic (And maybe sales) is decreasing.

Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search is the 2nd most popular out of the three, and will continue to run on its own after denying the offer from Microsoft. Microsoft may make another offer, nobody knows. Yahoo! has had its ups and downs in terms of profit and traffic, but it seems to provide a lot of services, just like Google.

In terms of results, the results they provide are strong. They don’t use their indexes as often as Google sometimes does and they don’t change the SERP’s as often as well, but this could actually be seen as good because your site has a less chance of completely changing positions in a couple of days. Punishments are very rare from Yahoo! too, which is a big positive.

Windows Live
Microsoft’s search engine, Windows Live, is the least popular of the three. Despite Microsoft being so popular and running so many services, they are still the least popular, which is quite suprising. I think its people Google and Yahoo! advertise more while Microsoft concentrate on other things.

In terms of results, Windows Live provides poor results basically. They index a lot of websites, but a lot of main websites aren’t involved and they expect you to submit it. None of the smaller sites I could think of were indexed, which says it all really. You would expect better from a company as big and powerful like Microsoft.

So, which do you think is better?

Stumble it!