Search Engine Blind Test

Have you ever wondered which Search Engine returns the best results for you? There is a site called Blind Search developed by Michael Kordahi, a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft.

It provides results from all three major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing in a random three colume result window but doesn’t tell you which engine it’s from. You choose your best results and vote for that Engine and only then you can see where it’s from. For me, it was Google once and Bing and Yahoo for the rest 9 times.

Here is what search engine experts saying at TechCrunch.

A few search engine experts we’ve spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they’re from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

This tool removes all the traces and branding from the search engines and force you to think for the results. You choose the best results and the search engine gets one vote. After 8 weeks, Michael published the results of votes and its really competitive. Out of 559,239 query count, the results are Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28% (as on 10th Aug, 2009).

This is really a serious threat to Google’s 70% of Market Share.