It’s not often that something brand new hits the internet that provides such an easy basis for comparison. I imagine this likely wasn’t one of the ideas on their minds when they released “SOG” late last week, but Scott and Alex did give me an interesting way to test the search leaders.

Previously, I’ve tested search engines before, but I’ve never been able to test and see exactly how quickly any of them pick up new content on the Internet.

Thanks to the new TagThru feature of FeedLounge, I had a brand new “word” to search for on the big 3. Here are the results:

Google (Link)

Yahoo! (Link)

MSN (Link)

I was a bit shocked that Google had no results and uselessly offered up “Together” as an alternative search phrase (who the hell searches for ‘Together’?). 3 days after launch, Google still didn’t know about the new FeedLounge feature… Could it really be?

I found it hard to believe, so I did a little more in-depth searching:

Google (Link)

Yahoo! (Link)

MSN (Link)

Sadly, it looks like Google’s still the only one in the game that’s… well… not. As often as their bot is crawling my little sites, I would expect them to pick up on news about FeedLounge from any of the hundreds of sites talking about it fairly quickly. Looking at the results from Yahoo! and MSN, it looks like this isn’t an unreasonable expectation either.

So what’s holding Google up? Is there that much analysis to be done on search results, that 3 days later they can still have not finished properly indexing a single site mentioning the phrase “TagThru” that they’ve grabbed since Friday’s launch?

If this spells any kind of growing trend, I’d say we’re looking at a transition period here. MSN appears to be showing the most relevent data first, although they’ve got some problems with the URLs they’re choosing to display with it (I’d rather see a link directly to the post on the FeedLounge blog, rather than to my.feedlounge.com). Could they actually be making all the progress that people like Scoble keep saying they are? In this instance, it seems like they are to me, but I’ll let you make your own decisions and we’ll see where time takes us…

As with so many things ‘tech, we sit back and wait once more…

UPDATE: Just to add another aspect of comparison, I decided to snag A9’s results: Looks like Google’s not the only one missing the party…