Sunday, August 09, 2009

Search engine blind test: poor Yahoo

I tried the search engine blinded comparison test:
Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test? - washingtonpost.com:
... Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn't tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results...
In my testing all the results were all pretty similar, but I also choose Yahoo. I think it was by chance, but I can believe Yahoo is better than it was. Bing was, as usual, the worst.

Poor Yahoo, finally somewhat competitive, but Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing.

The results are a bit misleading though. I'm a heavy user of Google Custom Search, both through Google Toolbar training and my hand crafted custom search set. Those results are much better, for me, than the blind search test results.

So Yahoo had caught up with the old Google, but Google's intelligent search optimization is a step beyond ...

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