Google Isn't Always The Best Search Choice

Live's online maps also often prove more useful than Google's, which are deservedly renowned. In addition to the satellite photography available at every mapping site, Live also provides aerial photos in and around many cities. They're taken from a much lower altitude than photos available elsewhere and show the sides of buildings, not just their roofs.

One of Yahoo's best features isn't on its home page: a bookmark-sharing site called del.icio.us that it bought in 2005. Since it lists only sites that people have bothered to save shortcuts to, a search there can produce far less fluff.

All that said, for most of the things we search for on the Web every day, it may not matter which search engine you use. In most of the dozens of searches I tried for such things as the schedule of the Screen on the Green outdoor movies on the National Mall and Jim Romenesko's widely read blog about the news media, all four sites yielded the Web pages I sought.

They all also provided such conveniences as cached copies of pages that I could bring up if Web sites were inoperative or overloaded, and links to limit searches to images or news stories.

Google functioned better with more esoteric topics, finding the little-trafficked Web site of an Arlington neighborhood and an obscure battery-testing program. Ask delivered the least relevant results in these tests, with Yahoo and Live's accuracy falling in the middle.

Google also excelled at finding recent news stories. On Monday afternoon, it found a story about the reversal of a patent-lawsuit ruling against Microsoft within minutes of the decision. At Ask, Yahoo and Live, the same query yielded only older, less relevant stories (in Ask's case, none newer than July 30).

All of the sites tended to be too eager to interpret search queries as sales opportunities. Looking for reviews of a new HDTV, for example, yielded only links to sites selling that set-- not any third-party reviews. A search on how to wash an autographed baseball jersey led only to sites selling -- you guessed it -- autographed baseball jerseys.

Just as e-mail services can have a hard time fending off spam, it seems that search engines struggle to tell when a user doesn't want to turn into a buyer immediately.

If one of Google's rivals can crack that problem before the market leader, then you might see the Web-search market get a lot more interesting.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/