Blind Testing your Search Engine: Yahoo, Google or Bing!
This pretty cool website allows you to run a blind test on the three major search engines at the moment, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Bing!. Now, search results have always been a very tight competition between tech companies as it is probably the main website that people visit and being ‘famous’ for providing consistent and reliable search results can mean very huge profits just by virtue of driving traffic to your website.
For many years now, I have been a loyal Google fan and scoff at anybody who uses other search engines, especially Yahoo’s. But research have shown that just by attaching a logo or trademark to search results, you can be biased towards the brand that you are used to. That’s the purpose of the Search Engine Blind Test website linked above.
The site is pretty simple, just type in any search query and it shows you results in three columns side by side. Simply choose the one you think shows you the best results and the site will reveal who them belong to. In my limited testing, I found that I tend to average pretty evenly between all three websites. Then again, it may be because my queries are pretty general and the results show more or less the same things, albeit ordered differently.
The website also supports searching for images, which is a plus for me because I do a lot of stuff that requires looking up images constantly and now I am able to search across all three sites in one page.
Understand though that this website will strip out all personalization and localization that companies like Google and Microsoft often incorporate into their search results. It is purely a test of the search algorithms with some parts of it disabled. Some argue that the personalization (where past searches are used to compute future search results) means the test is rather crippled. However, until someone comes up with a better idea, you can head on over to the website and let us know which search engines you end up choosing the most
This pretty cool website allows you to run a blind test on the three major search engines at the moment, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Bing!. Now, search results have always been a very tight competition between tech companies as it is probably the main website that people visit and being ‘famous’ for providing consistent and reliable search results can mean very huge profits just by virtue of driving traffic to your website.
For many years now, I have been a loyal Google fan and scoff at anybody who uses other search engines, especially Yahoo’s. But research have shown that just by attaching a logo or trademark to search results, you can be biased towards the brand that you are used to. That’s the purpose of the Search Engine Blind Test website linked above.
The site is pretty simple, just type in any search query and it shows you results in three columns side by side. Simply choose the one you think shows you the best results and the site will reveal who them belong to. In my limited testing, I found that I tend to average pretty evenly between all three websites. Then again, it may be because my queries are pretty general and the results show more or less the same things, albeit ordered differently.
The website also supports searching for images, which is a plus for me because I do a lot of stuff that requires looking up images constantly and now I am able to search across all three sites in one page.
Understand though that this website will strip out all personalization and localization that companies like Google and Microsoft often incorporate into their search results. It is purely a test of the search algorithms with some parts of it disabled. Some argue that the personalization (where past searches are used to compute future search results) means the test is rather crippled. However, until someone comes up with a better idea, you can head on over to the website and let us know which search engines you end up choosing the most
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