Inquisitive and competitive by nature, we wondered what would happen if we typed in very same question at Google. So we asked Google, "What is mass of Jupiter?" Amazingly enough, Google spat out an answer right at top of their results page as well. But Google's answer was, "mass of Jupiter = 8987 × 10 to 27th power kilograms." Now, we're Internet marketing experts, not rocket scientists, but it appeared that Google actually provided more precise answer.

Good humored sports that we are, we went promptly back to MSN Search to give it another try. Since their first result at least taught us that Jupiter's mass is 318 times that of Earth's mass, we typed in next logical question, "What is mass of Earth?," thinking that we could then arrive at our own conclusion by multiplying that answer by 318 to arrive at answer Google had already provided.

Unfortunately, MSN's answer to "What is mass of Earth?" was "Answer: World: mass: 1 Earth masses"

You'd think that folks over at MSN would have tested their examples on MSN Search as well as testing same queries on other major competitors before selecting them for final cut. Well, maybe not.

We then spent better part of afternoon periodically asking MSN Search and Google questions to see how they'd fare. If you're ever bored, try asking them, "How hot is sun?", "How many eggs are in a bakers dozen?" or "How far is it from New York to Utah?"

Here's what we learned from our afternoon of follies.

1. If you're looking for encyclopedia-type answers to questions like "What is a marsupial?" ask MSN Search (or visit encyclopedia.com or Britannica.com)

2. If you’re looking for a black and white photo of daisies, use MSN Search because image search is nicely arranged and you can filter results by size as well as by color or black and white.

3. If you’re looking for results “near me,” stick with Google’s automatically localized results by including city and state in your query.

4. If you’re looking for most precise answer, perhaps you should stick with Google (at least for now).

links, after a while, your site will start to suffer if you post same article on your website.

The search engines will see it as duplicate content and only highest ranking pages will get credit for articles. If

your site is not highest ranking, your article can help another website get more traffic than you do. So, make a few

changes, or better yet, create two separate articles on same topic.

Place one on your site, and submit other one to search engines. You get incoming links and other websites will

have to deal with consequences of an article that is distributed over 600 times online.

4. Follow links The purpose of links is not only to get a high google rank, but also as a way to bring in traffic. Seek out links from sites

with a high page rank and exchange links with some of your competitors.

It helps search engines to quantify your field of expertise since a site about web hosting wouldn’t naturally link to a

cooking site. You outbound links are just as important as your inbound links. It’s friends’ theory… show me where you

link and I’ll tell you what type of website you are.

Ok, so it’s my theory, but you get idea.