Search engine smackdown!

Communism vs. Capitalism.

Red Sox vs. Yankees.

And now for the next possible epic rivalry: a combined Microsoft/Yahoo vs. Google.

The big battle in this war, if the sale goes through, probably will be over search.

Google Inc. is the mighty champion of that field right now, but Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. also have search engines. Are they up to the challenge?

In a test, the same term was fed to Google, Microsoft's Live Search and Yahoo to examine depth of search and user-friendliness.

And, as in life, points also were given for appearance.

It's time for a search engine smackdown!

The test term: Coffee.

The elixir of life for many American mornings brought forth more than 100 million hits in each of the search engines.

Google was up first. At the top of the hit list was one of the features that makes this engine especially useful: a definition link that led to a site with information about the history, biology, cultivation, processing and worldwide production of coffee. Printed out, it ran 18 pages.

Then came a single sponsored hit for a site that sells mail order coffee (the rest of the sponsored links were tucked away on the right edge of the page), followed by "news results" that included an article about Procter & Gamble's plan to split off its Folgers Coffee division.

The Wikipedia encyclopedia entry came next, followed by the site for the Caribou Coffee chain.

What chain?

You'd be excused for not knowing. The nearest location is in Colorado. Yet it beat the ubiquitous Starbucks by four entries on the list, thus demonstrating the mysteriousness of search returns (search companies are reticent to reveal much of the secret sauce behind their methods).

Also on the first page, a National Geographic hit on coffee-producing countries and at the bottom were hits on a couple of books about coffee that led to Google's own book information service.

Altogether, it was a useful, clean presentation.

The highly caffeinated Yahoo search brought forth 674 million hits -- more than twice the other engines.

At the top of the results was an "Also try" feature that suggested other related links. First up: "Coffee Prince," a South Korean television series, followed by the No. 1 chain that keeps playing second fiddle, Starbucks.