So one lesson learned from our experiment is that a single word by itself may not give the search engine enough information to disambiguate the results sufficiently for our purposes. When we try the search again with two words 'robin bird' in all three cases most of the entries on the first page of results are actually about the birds known as robins. It is interesting to note that on Google and MSN the results for the phrase 'bird robin' are even slightly better than 'robin bird' suggesting that the position of the word in the search phrase conveys useful information to the search engines' programming.

Now that we know how to find plenty of entries about our birds, how do we know which one is the best suited for our purpose? It depends on what our purpose is, of course. Let's imagine we want to learn how to attract robins into our yard. When we try 'bird robin feeding' we see thousands of results from businesses ready to sell us bird feeders. We need to use something more specific to our purpose, like 'bird robin attracting'. In this case all three search engines give us results with at least one entry on the first page explaining how to attract robins into our yard.

Note also that there are 'meta search engines', such as dogpile that combine the results from the major search engines for us. They are useful when we don't have sufficient experience with the search term to know ahead of time which search engine will be most likely to give us the kind of results we seek.

Hope you find what you are searching for!