It isn’t about who has the better search engine. It is about how many pages the search engine has indexed. Google leads in this category. Exalead is another great search engine. Less than .05 % of the entire web is indexed for search engines to find them. In order for ANY search engine to return the result of John’s Homepage, it first needs to index that page. Right now the shared results from exact (very similar) searches on the 3 main search engines return a 12% match for two engines and a .04 % match for all three. Meaning if I searched for something on Google, around 12% of the web pages returned as matches would be found using the same search in LIVE or Yahoo. Around 4% of the same pages would be found on all three search engines using the same search criteria. This is not a science and the results vary depending on what time of the day the searches are done.
You should take a look at this chart to see where Google and Yahoo and MSM LIVE get their search results...http://www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm