Search Engine Compares Terms

This is cute -- a little Web tool that one can use to compare the popularity of two terms in a search engine AND compare the occurrence of another keyword in pages containing the compared words.

Not clear? It might be easier to show than tell. Go to compare-stuff.com (http://www.compare-stuff.com/). On the right side of the page is the search form. Enter two terms that you should compare (I chose Colorado and Montana.) You can add a global search term if you want. Below that is a yellow query box for adding a comparison term (I chose snow.)

At the bottom of the page are advanced options. You can change several options, including which search engine you use for this (unfortunately Google isn't available), how many things you want to compare (up to 4, so you could compare Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma), and what page-language you want to restrict your search to.

The results page is very interesting. You're shown the list of items you compared, how many "raw" results there were for each search, AND how many pages contained both the compared term and the comparison term (just-compare provides both the page count and the percentage of raw pages with the specified term.) The comparison ends with a nifty little bar graph.

You can mess up this engine -- compare the words Perl and Python and choose Perl as the comparison term. You'll get a word inclusion rate of 120% for the compared word Perl -- but it's an interesting idea, thoughfully put together, and carefully done. Good job. Worth a look. (And look REAL carefully -- they hid their PubMed version of this tool at http://compare-stuff.com/pubmed/. )

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