Comments [0] posted: Mar 15, 2007 Greg O'Byrne

I was curious if Google and Microsoft Live Search were biasing their results for..well let us just say less than friendly searches.  For example would the results for "google sucks" be different on both search engines.  Well of course the results are different, but so what?  What we really want to know is does the difference hold any signifigance?

Let's find out.

I used four terms and four search engines then ran a chi squared test to see if there was any significance.

Here are the observations I made:

Observed I hate google google sucks I hate microsoft microsoft sucks mean
Live Search 3,040,692 3,243,755 1,923,104 2,580,641 10,788,192
Google Search 13,900,000 3,030,000 7,770,000 2,260,000 26,960,000
Yahoo Search 24,000,000 9,830,000 14,400,000 6,140,000 54,370,000
ask.com 6,657,000 2,132,000 3,303,000 1,184,000 13,276,000
mean 47,597,692 18,235,755 27,396,104 12,164,641 105,394,192

Now these numbers don't mean much on their own, google might return a much higher number of results for all it's results.  Let's continue with the analysis.  Taking the sums and working through the second step of chi squared test, let's look at the expected results.

Expected I hate google google sucks I hate microsoft microsoft sucks mean
Live Search 4,872,119 1,866,619 2,804,276 1,245,178 10,788,192
Google Search 12,175,564 4,664,735 7,007,966 3,111,734 26,960,000
Yahoo Search 24,554,356 9,407,331 14,132,906 6,275,408 54,370,000
ask.com 5,995,653 2,297,070 3,450,956 1,532,321 13,276,000
mean 47,597,692 18,235,755 27,396,104 12,164,641 105,394,192

Some interesting numbers in there.  But nothing looks conclusive.  The only thing I might infer is that "sucks" is being over represented in the observed results and "hate" is being under represented.

Lastly let's look at the t-value and critical value and compare.

4,756,548  test statistic:
16.91897762  critical value:
0  p-value:
Null Hypothesis:  There is no correlation between what search engine you use and the how they handle returning bad pr links about themselves (or others)
And we accept the null.  There is no correlation.

Well there isn't enough here to make any conclusive arguments.  So anyone looking for anti-Microsoft ammo or anti-Google ammo is going to have to go somewhere else to find it.


      Comments [0]
tags: [google | Microsoft | search]

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