Search Engines' Test Beds

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Jan. 19, 2007 at 8:50am Eastern by Barry Schwartz

Search Engines' Test Beds

In Search of... Better Ways to Search at the Wall Street Journal goes through the different ways search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com use "spin off" sites to test new features. We have reported about all these in the past, but the article offers a nice overview of many of the methods search engines test features.

Google's Test Site: SearchMash.com
Yahoo's Test Sites: AllTheWeb and AltaVista
Microsoft's Test Site: Ms Dewey
Ask.com's Test Site: Ask X

The search engines also constantly test out new features to a subset of their users on their main sites.

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By Barry Schwartz Permalink Jump To Comments See Related Stories In: Ask: Ask X, Google: Other, Google: User Interface, Microsoft: Live Search, Microsoft: Other, Yahoo: SEO, Yahoo: Search, Yahoo: User Interface

Reader Comments

Here's a public version of WSJ article (no registration required) for those without a subscription.

Comment by DesignGrrl

| January 19, 2007 10:07 AM

Thanks DesignGrrl!

Comment by rustybrick

| January 19, 2007 10:42 AM

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