This afternoon, the two GrabPERF Agents at Technorati were switched back to using their local copies of caching BIND for resolving DNS entries.

Some folks at Microsoft who stopped by to look at their results on the Search Performance Index noticed that there were one or two outliers in the results from these locations. When I investigated, the OpenDNS name servers I was using were returning odd results.

The reason I had been using OpenDNS is that the local BIND instances were seeing unusual behavior a few months back. So, consider the switch to the local BIND instances probational, pending ongoing review.

Thanks to Eric Schurman for letting me know.

Via Statcounter, here is my search engine distribution for a log of 2,000 hits.

With statistics like these, is there really any point in having other search engines?

About four years ago, I published/posted a number of indices related to GrabPERF data. This is a re-launch of that, starting with the GrabPERF Search Performance Index.

The methodology of the Search Performance Index is straightforward: A number of key search providers are selected and HTTP GET requests are sent that directly pull the results page of a query page that is searching for ‘New York’.

This is a simple process and one that is a close approximation of the actual search process that hundreds of millions of people perform every day.

alias                       Response Time  Success  Attempts  Success Rate
--------------------------  -------------  -------  --------  ------------
SEARCH - Google Blogsearch      0.2822545    27242     27244       99.9927
SEARCH - Google                 0.3151932    27228     27247       99.9303
SEARCH - Live (Microsoft)       0.3840097    27245     27246       99.9963
SEARCH - Indeed                 0.4112960    27240     27241       99.9963
SEARCH - Yahoo                  0.4574381    24175     24175      100.0000
SEARCH - Altavista              0.4592764    23922     23922      100.0000
SEARCH - Cuil                   0.6757475    23963     23967       99.9833
SEARCH - AOL                    0.7822945    23913     23913      100.0000
SEARCH - Ask                    0.9025220    24157     24163       99.9752
SEARCH - Technorati             0.9053472    27219     27234       99.9449
SEARCH - Amazon                 1.3251402    27245     27251       99.9780
SEARCH - Baidu                  1.7409345    23777     23799       99.9076
SEARCH - Blogdigger             1.8960633    25106     26354       95.2645
SEARCH - BlogLines              2.0238809    27233     27248       99.9450
SEARCH - IceRocket              2.1233684    24147     24177       99.8759
SEARCH - Blogpulse              2.4144131    27019     27247       99.1632

As can be seen in the data, there is a substantial degree of difference in the response time results, but the big three search providers (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live) were in the top five. As well, all but three of the providers (Blogdigger, IceRocket and Blogpulse) had success rates (availability) of 99.9% or higher.

I don’t expect to see much in the way of change in these results, but I will post them for comparison each week.

Today I would like to announce the availability of the GrabPERF Search Performance Index.

The goal of the index is to provide performance metrics for a group of search providers around the world. The results are based on a direct HTTP GET request being made for the search results page by the GrabPERF Agent.

Currently only live data is available. In the near future, archival results on a week by week basis will be made available.

If there is a search provider that has been missed, please contact the GrabPERF team.