A employee of Microsoft, Michael Kordahi, has launched a “fun experiment”, side project to see how the three major search engines return results for the same keyword.
He calls the service, “BlindSearch, the search engine taste test.”
“”The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”
The columns are randomized with every query, so Google isn’t always in the first, second or third position.
Obviously, this works best for a site you own, to see how it ranks side by side on the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.
I did this for “the domains”, “luxury bedding” and “discount bedding” and the returned results for each of the three search engines, did match what I found doing a direct search.
In some cases Google was the best, returning the domain higher and sometimes Bing returned the better result.
Try it for yourself.
Michael makes the following disclaimer on this site:
“””The system has many flaws that I know about already, the primary one of interest is the lack of localisation. So, all searches are going through the US as US searches. The other deficiency worth noting is that there is much missing from the actual experience of using these search engines eg, image thumbnails, suggestions, refine queries etc.””
I chose the result that didnt have “as seen on tv” ranked high and the one that didnt give wikipedia a high rank…bing was the winner.
Very clever. Kudos. I hope this guy is more than just an employee with a fun experiment, or at least he gets a promotion. This was a smart move. Now if he can only get people to use it to collect the data.