Is Google better?

Apparently Google clearly dominates the online search market. Ok, from the simple user's point of view this is not that evident. I use it, you use it... According to Business Report, Google is lead with 48%, Yahoo follows with 24% and MSN is the third competitor with 14%. That's more than Yahoo 's and MSN's market share added up. And that's huge. (BusinessWeek stated almost the same numbers last year)

But this share is assured by several factors: one of them is the fact that "Google is better". Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf have decided to analyze the search engines by looking at the database update rate.
Their study included the main search engines - MSN, Google and Yahoo. The 38 sites were chosen among portal, news and lifestyle sites. The conclusions were that Google succeeds to index daily the highest number of updated pages, while MSN is the only one capable of indexing all the changes within 20 days. Yahoo has the most chaotic update mode, in both frequency and number of pages. (still, the results are stated to be true only for the german version of these SE)

Google does not only hold the first position in our overall ranking. When focusing on the indexing patterns this engine is superior since the first look at the results is impressive: No other search engine updates so many sites as constantly fast as Google.

Some interesting infos raised, when Opera 8.5 went free: Google is an important partner of Opera Software - because of the little search gizmo located in the browser, that's defaulted to Google's search engine, and for every search that originates from this browser, Google will give something back to Opera Software. That's how business goes.

The rumors turned out to be true: Google has started a beta program for secure wireless communication (now just in San Francisco, later, NY will follow). Nobody knows what Google will do next, but apparently has to do something with the company's image.

NASA announces that Google will be an active partner of the agency ("09.28.05 - NASA Takes Google on Journey into Space"). That's a very positive image element. People will say: "well, if NASA trusts Google, then Google must hold some pretty interesting technologies. You can trust it, even up there, in space!".

Google hires people for [tam-tada-dam...]: GoogleTV. That's nice. Another good image there. And for the media part of the information, Google indexes a lot of TV shows on it's own servers. Yes, that's right: Google records lots of these shows and lets you play them online on Google Video.

Also, Google dominates in machine translation tests. Google scored the highest in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology. The other two contestants were: IBM and University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

Google has also lots of cool features, and, the most important thing, ever adding or improving them (maps.google.com, Google Desktop Search, Google Earth, Google Hello, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Translate, etc.). But the most accessible and useful of them remains simply Google. It has a clean start page, no ads, no lots of links, no banners. For the ones who want a more portal-like approach: Interactive Google.

So, is Google better? I think, at least for the moment, it is. Comments anyone?