So the first thing I was curious about was what Google PageRank each of the other competitive search engines, or large directories, has. In other words I went out to look at how relevant Google says it is versus Bing and YAHOO. Google gives itself a 10 out of 10 while Bing and YAHOO rated a 9 out of ten. Google clearly thinks it is still the most relevant.
A search of Google for "Search Engine(s)" yielded AltaVista and DogPile at the top, with Google and YAHOO further down the list. To be fare, YAHOO has been considered more of a directory listing site than a search engine so that makes sense. The Bing search yielded similar results.
Next I will do the Hotel search test. Have you ever searched for a hotel near something, like say Cedar Point, and you get ten things that are NOT hotels? Yeah, me too! So frustrating to search for something and NOT get the exact thing you're looking for. We searched for "Hotels near cedar point" without the quotes, and here's the results. First, it seemed eerie how similar the Google and Bing results are! I immediately wonder if Bing isn't just another way to spin the same results you get elsewhere. A new package wrapped around the same engine perhaps. It does not seem as though they have changed anything about their spider or engine algorithm so far. Two things are most pertinent here.
Google had only one actual hotel in the natural search while Bing had none. There weren't even any hotels advertising, which is also amazing. So, Google won the natural search for this phrase by ONE result. HOWEVER, if you look at the fact that Google also added in their map results, which is ALL hotels, I must say that the Google search, with the Google map inserted, wins this search overwhelmingly! By the way, the Hotel was Comfort Inn. Looks like Comfort Inn is doing some pretty good Web marketing.