Search Engines’ Test Beds

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

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.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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2 COMMENTS ON Search Engines’ Test Beds

DesignGrrl, January 19th, 2007 at 10:07 am ET:

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

rustybrick, January 19th, 2007 at 10:42 am ET:

Thanks DesignGrrl!

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