Well the web is buzzing with search news these days with the launch of Bing (which is actually not too shabby!) so naturally we decided to take a closer look to see which performs best in terms of speed. We setup monitors for the index pages and for actual searches (while checking for a valid search result) and the results are in some ways what you might expect but in others, quite surprising!

Without further ado, here are the results..

Search Speed

Err.. well a bit more ado.. We perform a search every 5 minutes and check that the keyword we searched for appears in the result page. Response times are average over the last day and the charts are ‘live’ so you can see what the current status is as you view this article. We can probably assume these search engines are using fancy caching of some kind but we don’t care.. now we are only interested in the result speed not how they do it. No doubt they all have their own ways to work their magic and return a good result in a timely manner.

Rank	Search Engine	Response Time
#1	Google	649ms
#2	Bing	665ms
#3	Yahoo	965ms
#4	Ask	1111ms
#5	Twitter	2115ms

No surprise that Google is the fastest search engine around (of those we tested) but look at Bing – just 16ms slower than Google! Also of note, Google “cheats” in a way since their results pages do not actually contain the results if you view the source so probably they use ajax or some other technical wizardry to load the results in the page after it starts loading. Bing does include the results in the page source so possibly this 16ms difference could easily be made up if Bing tried the tricks that Google uses.

Poor Twitter search is struggling at the back there taking more than three times as long as Google to return a result.. however to be fair, despite barrel loads of VC cash Twitter still doesn’t quite have the resources which are available to Google and Microsoft. Clearly though, they have work to do there!

Index Page Speed

Again we check every 5 minutes but this time only the index page. Results here were not what I expected at all! Yahoo in first place and the mighty Google trailing the field?! No doubt heads will roll at the Googleplex for that!

Rank	Search Engine	Response Time
#1	Yahoo	748ms
#2	Ask	933ms
#3	Twitter	1017ms
#4	Bing	1062ms
#5	Google	1067ms

You can click the names of the search engines in the columns above to see the full live report for each which includes daily and monthly charts for speed and uptime/downtime and other exciting statistics.

So there you have it.. Google is first and last! Bing is snapping at the heels of Google with a very respectable result (so Steve Ballmer wont be launching any chairs just yet! ) and Twitter needs to get their skates on.

Update: seems that Google does include results in the results page source sometimes, not sure if its random or based on some query string param or who knows what but interesting to note anyway. The brief downtime you see on the Google monitoring report on June 7th was just us testing the results page source – Google wasn’t really down so don’t panic!