Friday Q&A

Questionable Comparison

Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome to another edition of the Friday Q&A. This weekly feature takes a look at issues facing Fark's Photoshop community. We've caught Super Bowl fever here at the Picture Clinic, as we were unable to afford a costly Super Bowl flu shot. This year, I'll even be offering my pick for winner of the big game.

Q: What is the best image search engine?

A: When searching for source images, there are several options at your disposal. Google has been the standard for a few years now, followed closely by Yahoo. Microsoft now offers Bing, a vast improvement over the impotent Live search, which as we all know was used mostly by racists and pedophiles. Apart from the Big Three of Yahoo, Google and Bing (I call them the Axis of Access) there are several other alternatives. Nowadays, pretty much every two-bit engine includes an option to search images.

Q: How do the Big Three stack up?

A: This question has been a matter of debate for some time. To get a definitive answer, I tried entering the same term into all three search engines. I'm pretty sure no one in the history of the Internet has thought to do this before. The results of my comprehensive test are listed below.

Google
Yahoo
Bing

As you can see, a simple term that normal people use every day delivers very disparate results amongst the three competitors. Their method of display varies a bit, too. Google and Yahoo share the conventional multi-page format, whilst Bing opts to show everything on one. If you're the last remaining human with a dial-up connection, the latter might cause some loading difficulties for you. But you're probably used to that sort of thing by now.

Q: Shouldn't a good Photoshopper use all three and more?

A: NO. Search engines are like football teams. You pick yours and stay with it. I chose Google a long time ago, and it suits me well. Others might like Yahoo. If you're a kiddie diddler or a white supremacist, you probably will choose Bing. My point is, pick one and stick with it religiously. I follow the same rationale when I bet on the Denver Broncos to win every Super Bowl game. They might not have much of a chance this year, since they aren't playing, but that didn't stop me from betting last week's paycheck. Go Broncos!

That's all for this time, gentle reader. Thanks again for stopping by. In what has become a media tradition, I will now offer my pick for the winner of this year's Super Bowl. I don't know much about the sport of football (it's the one where you score points by hitting the other team with a stick, right?) but my intuition tells me the Broncos will win by at least 100 touchdowns.
RIP Barrump
Stay tuned for more Super Bowl victories from the Broncos!