Monologic Platypus

An experiment in search engine behaviour

I've noticed that MSN's new search engine seems to behave in a very different way to Google. One of the things it does is update a lot quicker - I've seen a page show up in the index within a couple of days of being created. It also uses a very different algorithm to rank pages, meaning that it can reurn very different results to Google.

This page is an experiment to see how quickly Google, MSN and a few other search engines react to the creation of a new page, and to see how differently they rank it.

The search phrase I've chosen for the test is "monologic platypus". This makes for a good test, because there are currently no pages found by Google with that exact phrase, and only eight with both words non-consecutively. When this page is found by the seach engines, therefore, it will immediately appear in the first page of results for both the exact phrase and an all words match. It may also appear on the first page of results for either individual word, as neither of them are particularly common.

This page was added to the Internet at 14:30 GMT on Monday 14th March 2005.

I have created a separate page to track the progress of the page through various search engines. The update page is blocked from search engines by the use of robots.txt, so the content of that will not affect the results for this page.