ergophobe - 7:22 pm on Dec 9, 2009 (gmt 0)

If anyone mentioned it, I missed it -- Blind Search people!

It's all well and good to boycott a superior or inferior service for ideological reasons, but I would prefer to use the best service. How will I know which is which unless I do side by side searches.

My default search now is to blind search, which shows the big three in parallel columns in randomized order. I can look at the results and then pick which one I find best fits my search.

So, I'm predisposed to jump from Google for various reasons. But for my searches (and keep in mind this keeps Personalized search out of it), Google dominates and Bing is last.

I find that Google wins the majority of the edge cases where the SERPs are all pretty good, but one is clearly better (maybe 30%). Yahoo! wins the cases where two SERPs suck and one really stands out (maybe 10%). Bing only wins rarely (less than 5%). Over half, it isn't clear from the SERPS and even looking at the first results which is better. Often the top three results are identical and appropriate.

So much as I thought my default to Google was just habit, after a couple of months of "blind searching" I find that actually, Google simply provides better results *to me* in the majority of cases.

The owner of blind search also posted some results showing that over several months, Google was the winner. And I believe he's a MS employee!