Today, we will take a look at our top four search engines and how they present results in different ways. Please take a look, try them out and let us know what you think.

Google: Not much needs to be said about people’s favorite search engine with its 85% market share. As we know, it works fine, but why not take a look at a meta-engine like Dogpile, see below, that includes Google results plus results from the other major engines.

Bing: Microsoft markets Bing (3% market share) as a “decision engine,” not a search engine. This means that Bing provides you with contextual information for your searches. For example, try searching for “Denver.” You get a nice summary box with a list of Denver’s top attractions, all the neighborhoods, the weather, and upcoming events.

Dogpile: Dogpile combines results from the four leading search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Dogpile claims that on average 88% of search results are unique to one specific search engine. Only about 12% are shared by two or more engines. While we have not tried to confirm these numbers, Dogpile is my personal favorite search engine. It gives me the peace of mind that I did not overlook anything by just using Google.

Clusty (by Vivisimo): Instead of presenting you with one long result list, Clusty categorizes your search results by topic. This makes it much easier for you to find the results you are actually interested in. For example, when searching for the term “SharePoint,” you will get a cluster with information on “SharePoint Services,” another one including sites of “SharePoint hosting companies," a third one for “SharePoint training providers,” another one for “SharePoint consultants” and finally, a cluster with sites that focus on the new “SharePoint 2010.” Clusty is based on the concept of Latent Semantic Analysis and powered by Vivisimo’s so-called Velocity Platform. Unfortunately, Clusty does not use Google search results as the basis for its clusters, but is based on Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Long story short, we recommend you give Dogpile a try. It includes the best results from all the major search engines, including Google, and you can be sure that your search didn’t miss a thing.