You probably know the saying “you should eat your own dog food”. It means that you should use your own products – everything else would tell your customers that you’re not trustworthy. Or would you buy a Mercedes if Dr. Dieter Zetsche was driving a Toyota?
With search engine vendors it’s the same. You would surely expect that the companies are using their own technology for searching their corporate websites, and of course they do. But how good are they at it? With most of the commercial search engine packages you can get average results with out-of-the-box configuration. For adding a really helpful service to your website however, you need to tweak and tune both data and software in order to being able to answer your users’ questions. No wonder that all vendors do not only offer their software but consulting on data aggregation, data cleansing and configuration of their products. So they must be experts at these tasks. But does this show as well on their own websites? Let’s chose three different vendors, navigate to their sites and ask them some questions – because they will know.
