
  Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?  - jmonegro
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-choose-in-the-blind-test/
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nimbix
I've seen this link a couple of times a while ago when Bing launched. Most
commenters said: "Hey, look! In a blind test Yahoo and Bing are just as good
as Google!". What they forgot, though, was that being just as good is not good
enough for most of us to switch. Google didn't gain its market share by being
just as good as HotBot and AltaVista. It did it by being much, much better.

~~~
mynameishere
If microsoft and yahoo are much worse than google, then they have 101
problems. If they are roughly as good, then they have 1 problem: Pushing it
forward one bit more.

Anyway, I actually use different engines now and then, and for the most part
they're all the same. For complicated/obscure stuff, google is still
considerably better. For mom and pop I'm not sure that matters though.

Google's clearest advantage is its unbelievable speed, which is great for
news/current topics. A test, here's a string that doesn't return results in
google: conquistador monkey bakery laughter confusion fear hatred love citizen
kane mantra manhatten mongrel montell carebear

(Yes I had to string together that many words. Carebear broke the fucker's
back.)

Anyway, I'll check back and see how long it takes the various engines to pick
it up. Google will be first. I predict about 30 minutes. It's 10:50 right now.

ED: 11:00 nothing; 11.11 nothing; 11:35 nothing (looks like my prediction was
wrong); 12:31 nothing. Things are going horribly awry.

~~~
nimbix
I'm not sure about comments, but I have also noticed myself that Google can be
surprisingly quick at picking up new submissions.

~~~
Scriptor
It already has the poll about whether yc startups use Django, Rails, PHP, or
other.

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tsally
Google has some combination of your email, calendars, bookmarks, web browser,
phone number, payment service, ad service, office suite, and physical phone.
All of these make Google one click closer than any competitor. It's game over,
at least for now.

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petercooper
Nearly always Google but sometimes Bing. Never Yahoo.

I was pretty shocked how hideous Yahoo's results are by this.. often "scraper"
sites were appearing in the top 10, and eventually spam sites became a dead
giveaway to which one was Yahoo. Eugh.

~~~
dpcan
I had the exact opposite situation. 5 searches for random topics that I'd
searched for in the last 3 days at Google, and I chose Yahoo 4 times and Bing
1 time, never Google. I didn't expect these results at all.

~~~
petercooper
What sort of things? I was going with reasonably general, basic queries..
things like names of famous people, city names, and things like "[topic]
blogs". I didn't go with anything longer than two words.

One particularly poor example was "ruby blogs" - see the results:
<http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ruby+blogs> \- results 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10 are
pretty irrelevant. On Google, the top 6 results, at least, are really solid.

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redshift
I consistently picked Yahoo results. But with Google I don't have to deal with
all the garbage that surrounds Yahoo.

~~~
jcw
Bing and Yahoo's pages are either bloated with images and effects or
overwhelmingly busy. I search with Google because of its fast and minimal
interface. I'm not distracted by eye-catching advertisements or anything, and
I get my results immediately. I could care less about slightly more accurate
results.

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mojaam
Is this really blind? A lot of people would probably search for something they
are used to searching on say google and can maybe recognize the search engine
based on the order of the results.

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mwexler
Not sure who came first... I've been using <http://bset.royans.net/> for the
past few weeks.

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zaidf
This is eye opening.

I've always thought about this. Awesome seeing someone craft a study, even if
it has its flaws.

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axod
Mostly google, sometimes yahoo, never bing.

