Underscores or Hyphens or Spaces - Which one is better?

There has been long discussions going among different Search Specialists regarding which one is better to use in the URL optimization process either Underscores are better or the Hyphens or Spaces?. To find out this i have run a simple experiment

On Google SERPS
1) xml sitemaps generator
2) xml-sitemaps-generator
3) xml_sitemaps_generator

I could find out that there is no significant differences in either using spaces or hyphens or underscores in the urls for the above three results. Interesting point to note here is that underscore parsing seems to be showing only few results on Google SERP's in 3 case, probable reason behind this might be people not using any underscores in their URLS (according to my opinion)

On Live
4) xml sitemaps generator
5) xml-sitemaps-generator
6) xml_sitemaps_generator

Similar search on live showed that even here it doesn't show any major differences in using either space or hyphen or underscore. An interesting point to note here is that if we could compare the results of 3 and 6 from Google and Live, we could observe that Google performing better than Live in showing the results as in Google we can find a result with an underscore where is in Live we cant observe any such.

You can run a similar experiment on Yahoo! and find the results
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Natural Search Listings

An Search Engine Marketing firm iProspect(Original Search Engine Marketing Firm) survey revealed that 60.5% of Google, Yahoo!, MSN(now Live) and AOL users selected a natural search results over paid search results and the most surprising stats are that 60.8 percent of Yahoo! and 72.3 percent of Google search engine users chose natural search results as more relevant. Which is a clear indication that natural search listings are getting more clicks than Paid(Sponsored) listings.
In addition to this studies from Enquiro(a B2B Search Marketing Company) and iProspect(Original Search Engine Marketing Firm) exposed that 60.5% to 70.0% of users trust natural(organic) results while only 30% to 39.5% of users trust paid(Sponsored) results.

This clearly indicates that a listing in the natural(organic) search results is worth more compared to paid(Sponsored) listings in terms of higher click rate.

Although this may be the fact that natural search results helps in generating high quality traffic and business, there are considerably large number of crowd and still a great deal of companies which are spending higher amount of budgets on Pay Per Click Advertising and doesn't want to shift from it
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