When you ask a group of recruiters about which search engine they prefer you are likely to get many and diverse response starting from AltaVista, Google, Yahoo, live, etc… You also might hear people say “I used to prefer (fill in the name,)” but changed to yahoo or Google or live because it was better. And the one thing that you will soon realize is that everyone’s definition of better varies as well. Since search engines are free and user can go from one search engine to another search engines compete for our loyalty.

The reasons for liking a particular search engine are as varied as the algorithms and the relevance ranking systems that separate them the rest. Some people will prefer a search engine just for its size others because they heard it was the best and they believe it, others because their search engine gives them good results or because they are innovative or some may even use it just because all their friends use it. All crawler-based search engines have the same basic parts, but that is where the similarities end. They all have different algorithms and ranking systems.

That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results. So the question that is just begging to be asked is “What makes a search engine a good one?” The easy answer would be (drum roll, please) – “The one that meets your preference”. All joking aside, there are several things to consider in evaluating a search engine for the value it brings to your sourcing efforts.

The first issue to consider is ease of use. When you think of the large amounts of information search engines collect and organize for us to find, it is impressive that the results make sense at all. Having said that, it sound easy to enter a few keywords and “presto” out come the candidate you need, right? Not so fast, when you evaluate how easy it is to use a search engine you have to consider at least four areas that affect our ability to evaluate it.

First is basic search functions, which includes how easy it is to use basic Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), how easy it is to search for phrases, how easy it is to do truncation searches, among other things. The second criteria to consider is that of limiting, how easy is it to limit results to a geographical area (city, county, zip code, etc…) how easy is it to limit results to a desired amount of results, how easy it is to limit searches to a file type, etc… well, you get the picture. The third criterion to consider is that of function i.e. does the search engine guide you and suggest keywords for better results? How does the search engine handle abbreviations acronyms etc? The last area to consider would be ease of achieving the desired results; and along the same lines is how easy it is to understand the displayed results.

The next time you thing running a google search is easy try the following query: ~resume –resume This query is asking google to return the results for the synonym of the keyword “resume” minus the keyword “resume”. Out of the top ten results “job” is returned as a synonym for resume. How easy then is it to find candidate resumes when google wants to show you jobs instead?