Google vs Bing vs Yahoo – Seconds in a year

I was doing some quick calculations in an excel spreadsheet and wanted to multiple a value around the number of seconds in a year.   I did not know the number off the top of my head.  So the simple way to solve that issue was to do a fast google search.  I love the type ahead answers and google just answered the question for me, with out even having to go to a site

I did a search for “seconds in a year”  While looking at the results before mys search was done.  I wanted to compare if Bing or yahoo had that feature.  So I opened up a new tab and ran the same search.    Then something interesting happened.  I got 3 different results.   Google, yahoo, and bing all answered the search question of “seconds in a year” differently.    Before I go into my finding, I do want to recognize that the question can be disputed.  Because the definition of a year was not defined.  As you can see from the results I did not specifiy a calendar year, leap year or  Julian year.

Since my quick and dirty excel document was just a rough calculation I did not necessarly care about the type of year, only wanting the seconds.

Google answered:  1 year = 31 556 926 seconds – This is based on the Julian year (probably what I wanted)

 

Bing answered:  1 year = 31,536,000 seconds (calendar year)

Yahoo answered : 1 Second = 3.1688765E-8 Years.  I think yahoo was confused.  It thought I wanted to know how many years were in 1 second.

 

At the end of the day, I took the google answer and finished the task I set out to complete.  But this brought up a good conversation at work on what search engine to trust.   During this process I did read an article on calendar / seconds at answers.com.     Reminding myself what the Julian calendar was and leap year.

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