Google: Go to the head of the class. Wikipedia: You stay after school for extra tutoring.

That seems to be one of the conclusions you can draw from a fun blog post today by Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram.

Writing about the Jeopardy battle between past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and IBM’s Watson computer (the computer won a dry run earlier this month), Wolfram decided to see how several search engines would fare when asked to answer Jeopardy clues.

The results? Google scored highest in both having the answer show up anywhere on the first page of search results and having it show up in the first result on page one.

Ask.com was a close second in getting the correct answer anywhere on page one, while Bing was a close second in getting the correct answer in the first search result. Wikipedia’s search was last in both tests.

But Ken Jennings, Jeopardy‘s all-time champion in wins and earnings, answered about 79% of his questions correctly — a lot more than any search engine. Which suggests two things: Either he’s an immediate acquisition candidate in Mountain View and Redmond, or he should just start his own search engine and answer queries as they come in.

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Yandex | Wolfram Alpha | Yahoo: Search

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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