The effectiveness of Web search engines to index new sites from different countries, by Ari Pirkola, Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere, 33014 Tampere, Finland, Information Research (June )
This study showed that Google and Live (now Bing) are good at picking up new US websites, but not at finding others. The study looked at newe Finnish, French U.S. domain names.
Abstract:
"Introduction. Investigates how effectively Web search engines index new sites from different countries. The primary interest is whether new sites are indexed equally or whether search engines are biased towards certain countries. If major search engines show biased coverage it can be considered a significant economic and political problem because of the international nature of the major search engines.
Method. We examine what share of the sites of recently registered domain names from a certain country appears in a search engine index after a given period of time following registration of the domain name. We consider how effectively the Websites of new Finnish, French U.S. domain names are indexed by two US-based major search engines (Google and Microsoft's Live Search) and three European search engines (Virgilio, www.fi Voila).
Results. The results showed that Google provided the highest coverage of the five search engines that US-based search engines Google and Live Search indexed US sites more effectively than Finnish and French sites. These findings are in line with earlier research findings based on a different method and different countries. The Finnish www.fi indexed only Finnish sites and the French Voila only French sites. Virgilio indexed European sites more effectively than US sites.
Conclusions. The biased coverage of Google and Live Search raises concern because of their international nature. The coverage bias by the European search engines only seems to have local or regional significance."
It does suggest that if you are doing research that requires European sources, it would be wise to look to European search engines.
Of course, we must be mindful that Google depends on inlinks - if a site isn't linked to, Google won't find it.
Posted by Gwen at June 15, 2009 01:13 PM