Yahoo all the way! XD

For some reason my search generated only ONE hit for Google on the Blind Search page, while generating at least 10 using Google.com. Google lost that round because of that, even though Google's real results were much better.

Just checked the overall score but I didn't search myself since the Yahoo column was broken (invalid arguement etc). The latest results are:

Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23% | 3912 votes

Like you said...interesting test.

yahoo broken, bing leading with 42% against google's 41%

Another big caveat of this comparison is that it strips Google's universal search results. Mixing the results from the different types of search is one of the big pluses of Google.

Also, of course, it doesn't take into account the UI of any competitor. That also plays an important role.

19:42 – Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 22% | 8,729 votes

Weird--I was going to post a refresh (something like 45% to 33% to 21% with ~8500 votes) but now the site seems to be down for the last few minutes?

Blind search engine test at http://blindsearch.fejus.com Right now: "Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 21% | 8,518 votes"
http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/2066515571

I just can't believe Bing is so high. If you try all the results with French versions of the search engines, clearly Bing doesn't reach 5%.

Another blind test has been performed in France few years ago:
http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2006/03/search-and-winner-is.html

TOMHTML, this is just my personal guess from watching from afar, but I think MSFT has put a lot of effort into the U.S./English version of Bing, but not as much on the non-English versions.

P.S. the site is back up now: "Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 22% | 10,093 votes"

I think they should randomize the column order. Now google is always in the middle so it isn't completely blind test.

The column order is random, at least here, I had Google left and in the middle a few times.

On other related news on Bing. According to Statcounter (link below) Bing HAD a market share of 15% on Thursday. Now the hype is over, yesterday it was 6.86%. In The Netherlands it was 1.69 wich is very high! :-). (Live Search had 1%).

Non-English versions are still in beta and, well.... it's just the same as Live Search was.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20090601-20090606

A lot of people are using the tool, now an hour later there are 13,026 votes, this was 8,729 votes at 19:42.

Quickly created a OpenSearch file for this, so that you can use blind search for awhile directly from the search element in firefox. (To see how it will do with general queries). Find at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=blindsearch

> Now google is always in the middle so it isn't
> completely blind test.

Can't reproduce this – I'm getting Google in different positions – was that just an (unlucky) coincidental row for you, or was it a temporary bug or something?

I think it was just a coincidence.

Yahoo went from 20% to 35% in just a couple hours and continues to rise. Seems like a large coincidence, but who knows? :) That's the problem with this sort of self-selecting poll; you're not sure about the demographics of who is voting.

The point of the test:

Do people use Google because it is really better or is it because well it's Google?

And now Yahoo's at 41%, less than 20 minutes later. This poll is pretty suspect at this point.

Philipp, it was just a coincidence.

Poll might well be hacked now:

> Google: 31%, Bing: 24%, Yahoo: 45% | 40,739 votes

Let's see if the creator can find some counter measures, and perhaps reinstate the pre-hack numbers (if it's a hack). I'll add another update to the post.

I think the poll creator is asleep right now. With any luck, the poll hackers did something like always vote on the same query ("Yahoo! RuLeZ!") and the hacked votes can be excluded.

The methodology for this is flawed because people will tend to search for things they have searched for before on Google and then pick Google as the best because they find that ranking more familiar.

Or maybe regular people are searching instead of geeks?

Nah, probably someone skewing the results. Maybe they shouldn't allow the same query more than a few times.

The poll creator is awake again, and says this: "UPDATE: Some douche is gaming the system, I've removed the ability to see the results until I sort this out. Meanwhile you can still have fun playing with blind search. Feel free to blame the douche for ruining it for everybody."

Indeed the poll has been compromised probably equally due to my lack of leet skills and a malicious person gaming it.

Will eventually get around to fixing the data.

I can also pinpoint when said douche appeared on the scene. So the numbers when the poll had 15k hits are probably the most indicative.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t take this a scientific whats-e-ma-jing, it's just a bit of observational fun.

Thanks all

Michael, if you write a blog post about the douche or interesting stuff that they did, please tweet me. I'd love to read what the jerk did. And it was definitely a fun project. :)

whatismyhostname http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=foxyweb+whatismyhostname

It's a nice project. I discovered I liked Yahoo results sometimes better than Google, but in my various tests I didn't choose bing ever.

Matt Cutts wrote: <i>And now Yahoo's at 41%, less than 20 minutes later. This poll is pretty suspect at this point.</i>

And so what if it is? The point isn't to "prove" who is better. The point is to enable users to discover for themselves, without branding, what search engine best meets their needs.

Google used to even put links to other search engines at the bottom of their own 1st results page, and now they don't. Frankly, not only would it be very user-useful to me to have those links back on Google, but it would also be useful to me if Google were to report similar statistical information about other search engines (and vice versa), such as "you clicked the 4th link on the page.. if you had used Yahoo, that link would have been ranked 2nd" or something to that effect.

This little test, even if the results get hacked, makes an interesting point, which is that there is a whole lot more that every search engine, Google very much included, could be doing, and are not. And that includes sending its users off to another search engine, when there is good evidence that another search engine might yield better results.

Kizs, while the blind search is certainly great at comparing the top three U.S. search engines, lots of people would also have written articles about the poll results too. Pointing out that the ballet box was being stuffed wasn't a bad thing in that context.

Regarding "Google used to even put links to other search engines at the bottom of their own 1st results page, and now they don't," a member of my team recently wrote a Greasemonkey script to add those links back in. If you're interested, check it out at http://mattcutts.com/retrolinks/ and play with it. Who knows--maybe we'll port that code to a Chrome extension, too.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/06/2338233/Microsofts-Bing-Refuses-Search-Term-Sex-In-India

Microsoft filtered some keywords like "SEX" in India

On a slight digression – the Bing commercial (is that bad or what?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HlxLMExPQw

[via http://searchengineland.com/bing-a-google-killer-get-real-20510]

WTF? What had any of the first 20 seconds got to do with bing? Rediculous. Terrible ad.

Yes it's not a very strong ad, but if you think this is bad, listen to the so called "Bingtones", there worse :-).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=043c49db-e33b-4603-a699-9f1fba8e9245

Bingtones

Matt

>Kizs, while the blind search is certainly great at comparing the top three >U.S. search engines, lots of people would also have written articles >about the poll results too. Pointing out that the ballet box was being >stuffed wasn't a bad thing in that context.

Ok, I see what you're saying. In that context, yes, it does make sense to point it out. I guess I just had to point out what the context was really about, which was to get a personal sense of what does and does not work for you, the individual user. That experiment is still valid, and people should still be encouraged to try it, even if the poll numbers should not be cited.

What would have been even more fair and balanced (pardon the expression :-) for you to point out is that there have been other, 3rd party blind studies like this, ones that have not been compromised, and the results are fairly similar to the pre-compromised poll numbers.

>Regarding "Google used to even put links to other search engines at >the bottom of their own 1st results page, and now they don't," a >member of my team recently wrote a Greasemonkey script to add >those links back in. If you're interested, check it out at >mattcutts.com/retrolinks/ and play with it. Who knows--maybe we'll >port that code to a Chrome extension, too.

Is that an official Google download? If so, why is it not available from google.com? Other than the 0.0001% of the Google user base that reads this and your blog, how is everyone else supposed to know about the script's existence (much less know what greasemonkey even is, and how to work with it)? Previously, that valuable feature was made available to 100% of Google users. Now you have to be a computer geek to use it? How is that at all generally useful?

And if it's not an official Google download, how is it that you are able to get around Google's Terms of Service? Don't those Terms explicitly state, "You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them." Aren't you essentially reformatting Google search results, by altering the appearance of the results page using the greasemonkey script, adding in extra buttons and/or links where none existed before? How is it that Google allows this? And if Google does allow this, where is the line, the boundary? Can I write, and publish to the world for everyone to use, a greasemonkey script that intersperses Google results with Yahoo results? Can I write a script that removes Google ads and replaces them with Microsoft ads? And suppose I worked for Microsoft (I do not), could I bundle that script with my OS? Where is the boundary?

No need to answer all that. What I am trying to say is that I think that the greasemonkey solution is a poor answer to the issue of where all the links to other engines went. It was useful to have them, and they should return, native to Google's results presentation, not external through 3rd party scripts, even if those 3rd parties happen to be Google employees.

*facepalm*

I don't think Microsoft trying to install a search preference towards a society that wants certain behaviours to be banned will create more traffic for it's engine. Peoples habits tend to flow with the most easily transacted information. I think Google does that pretty well for users right now.