It's often hard to do away with personal bias when evaluating the quality of search results across different search engines - you may be more familiar with the interface of a particular engine, which skews your perception of what is genuinely most relevant, or you may just like seeing your own sites and pages in the top spot. Of course, relevance can be defined somewhat more strictly than that - but it's always a matter of taste.
Enter the search engine blind taste test, by someone called Michael Kordahi:
It allows you to view results from each of the "big three" search engines - but without knowing which is which. Note that the author is a Microsoft employee, and hence has a vested interest in steering people away from the overwhelming brand in the search marketplace (Google). And of course, the recent rebrand of Microsoft's Live search engine as "Bing" is likely an added incentive. In the online marketing community there were a lot of positive comments about relevancy in Bing results - which surprised me, as much of the same community slammed the results when the same algorithm was framed as "Live" ;)
In any case, the test itself is valid enough, and you might be surprised at the results. Head over to Blind Search and see for yourself.
Comments
Brilliant! Try searching for "Search Engine"
I tried the example in your screenshot. Only one of the search engines gets two out of the three market leaders... and the winner is not who you would think (imho).
I could play with that for hours. Do they give any stats on who is winning do you think? I bet they won't until they can do a "Pepsi Challenge" on Google.
Counts of results were removed unfortunately
It seems the author turned off the results count as someone was cheating ;)
http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=830
Bing-i-licious!
After 6 questions, the search engines scored 3 a-piece however, after 15 or so, Bing had started to edge ahead (to my surprise). I'm certainly interested in testing this further!
Now if only Microsoft would improve the back end of the advertising system to compliment any traffic increases they might gain from this latest rebranding!!
Reputation rather than delivery.
My love of Google has been shown to be a little unjustified as it seems I've actually been in love with Bing this whole time. I was surpised that I prefered the Bing results on two of three searches I tried but it doesn't change the fact that Google is where it's at if you want to be seen by the most people though.
Find the Lady
I chose my 'favourite' only about once in three - so by chance alone - but, devoid of their front page branding (Google = minimalist; Yahoo = busy to the pont of cluttered; MSN = energetic wallpaper) then there's not much to go on until you can check out the results.
Perhaps this is the old marketing lesson that it's no good having a great product or service if it's in rubbish packing. I don't know which search engine is the 'best' but I do know which one I prefer to use and I think I know why - so I'm going to use it even if it isn't as good as the technical best.
And one design of packaging/branding of search engines may not be suitable for everyone - time for a bit of market sectoring or multiple brands by the same search engine (as for washing powders and cars).
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