DISCLAIMER: this is absolutely, most definitely not a scientific study, and nobody in their right might should use this information for anything other than entertainment purposes.

There, now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s get right to it.  Who do you think is more evil: Google or Microsoft?

Since evil is technically subjective, and all things being equal, perhaps the best way to figure out who is more evil is to ask an Internet search engine.  To be fair, though, I’ll use a few search engines: Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.  And, for now, we’ll only focus on English speakers.  It’s possible that other langauges think that one or the other is more evil, but English should be a good sample set to make some conclusions — even if they are completely faulty.

Let’s take a look at the results!

Results

Test samples:

Google Search: “Microsoft is evil” — 26,900 results

Google Search: “Google is evil” — 35,300 results

MSN Search: “Microsoft is evil” — 38,000 results

MSN Search: “Google is evil” — 29,400 results

Yahoo Search: “Microsoft is evil” — 129,000 results

Yahoo Search: “Google is evil” — 192,000 results

Control:

Google Search: “Digg is evil” — ~500 results

MSN Search: “Digg is evil” — 73 results

Yahoo Search: “Digg is evil” — 86 results

Conclusions

There’s really nothing you can take away from this research that would be useful, especially since as I mentioned “evil” is subjective and the search phrase could be easily taken out of context, but here are a few suggested conclusions to ponder.

• Google has ended up crawling more sites viewing Google as being evil.
• Microsoft has ended up crawling more sites viewing Microsoft as being evil.
• Yahoo has made sure to crawl more sites that spin Microsoft in a more positive light than Google.
• Google is more evil than Microsoft, but not by a wide enough margin to draw even a flimsy conclusion.
• Google should probably stop touting their “Do No Evil” motto — since it could lead to skewed results.
• Yahoo appears to crawl more things about evilness in general — both searches resulted in over 100,000 hits, whereas Google and MSN clearly were not displaying that content in their search results.
• Digg is not as evil as Google or Microsoft, although Google seems to think so a bit more than Microsoft or Yahoo.

Filed under: Consumer Web