With more than 80% share in the search market, you may be forgiven for thinking that Google would consider itself to be the best search engine, but strangly they don’t.

Ok so if they don’t think they should be number 1 for search engine it must be Bing, or even Yahoo surely?

Erm, no actually, according to Google, the best result for search engine is… Dogpile!, seriously Dogpile. Number 2 is Altavista, a name I haven’t even heard in years.

So according to Google, the best two search engines are Dogpile and Altavista!.  Google have explained that as the visitor is searching on Google at the time then they don’t actually need to see Google. But this doesn’t explain why Bing and Yahoo don’t appear number 1 and 2.

My guess is that whatever algorithm Google uses to stop Yahoo and Bing search results appearing in Google is at work hear, as Dogpile and Altavista don’t actually use their own search service but use Google’s, Bing’s and Yahoo’s then they are safe to appear in the result.

In an update to the previous post, Google’s Matt Cutts has finally answered commented on the question asked back in July:

“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

You can see his video over at the Google Webmaster central video channel, but it may be difficult to spot as it actually answers a completely different question:

“Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?”

This has caused a backlash by many in the SEO industry, so much so that Matt Cutts actually posted an article on his blog “More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results” , unfortunately it still doesn’t answer the question, or explain why Google UK results are so poor. It’s not confined just to UK search either though, other countries are seeing this invasion of poor irrelevant results.

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Google UK has been showing a large amount of fluctuation in it’s natural search results since late May 09 and this is still going on. As a science fiction and fantasy fan I often check where my other site is for this term.

Up to May the results returned for this search term were around 14.2 million and then late may they shot up to around 28 million results, many of these on the first few pages of either very low quality, old or from a different country including the USA and India.

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