What is the best search engine?

Which search engine is the best?

The web has grown from a single website in 1991 ( World Wide Web Project ) to more than a billion unique host names today. Around three quarters of those are inactive sites—parked domains and the such—but that still leaves over a quarter of a million sites. If you visited 10 different websites each day, it would take you roughly 70 years to get through them all, and that's only if no more sites are added. Yeah, fat chance of that happening!

ADVERTISING

Now imagine having to crawl each website, catalog the content, and then memorize the URL of each one so that if someone asks where they can find information about Siamese cats or what to do if stung by a scorpion, you can rattle off a list of appropriate URLs. Even Rain Man would be intimidated with such an impossible task.
Not to worry, there are better ways to the surf the web. Whenever we need to look up something online, we simply type our query into a search engine and wait for the results. On a high-speed connection, you can expect thousands and even millions of results in under a second—that's pretty miraculous, when you think about it.
Google is the only search engine that's generally accepted as a verb, as in, "Hey Bob, did you ever get around to Googling the honey badger video I told you about?" However, it's not the only search engine in town. Microsoft's Bing and Gabriel Weinberg's DuckDuckGo are two of the more popular alternatives, and like Google, each wants to be your go-to search engine.
Is one better than the other? That's a great question, so we set about tackling it by comparing the three competitors. We came up with several categories that are relevant to today's search queries, and then had each of the candidates show us their stuff. Hit the jump as we separate the contenders from the pretenders!

Accuracy

Determining accuracy is arguably the single most important aspect of evaluating a search engine, so we decided to jump right into the thick of things. Unfortunately, this is also the most challenging category, as it requires a fair amount of subjective analysis. With that in mind, we tried several different queries to see if any of the search engines stood out with more relevant results to what we had in mind.
We started off easy by searching for the time in Ecuador. All three search engines came back with the correct time, though only Google gave us the result before we were finished typing, let alone had a chance to click the search button.
This was followed by a search for Rowland High School, which is actually John A. Rowland High School, though we figured dropping the "John A." at the beginning shouldn't be problematic. And it wasn't. All three found the school in question, though DuckDuckGo opted to post a Wikipedia summary and an advertising link at the top of the results, whereas both Google and Bing plopped the school's homepage URL at the top. Bing did slightly better by also including a Facebook link on the first page -- Google made us go to the second page for it.
We tried several other searches, including the copying and pasting of a line from a recent article on our website. All three sites found the correct article, though only Google highlighted the line in the summary underneath the URL. Bing and GoGoDuck both didn't include the line in the summary. Why does this matter? If you're looking up an article based on a quote that stands out for whatever reason, only Google's presentation lets you know that it's found the correct URL before clicking through.
Switching our attention to breaking news, it was pretty much a wash between all three, even with only just minimal information. On the same day that a man armed with a small knife tried breaking into the White House, we performed a simple search for "White House" and all three came back with relevant news links for the breaking story.