Blind Search Reveals Which Engine You Really Prefer

If you saw blind results for your search terms from Google, Bing and pre-Bing-partnership Yahoo, would you always choose Google? The Blind Search site lets you take a blind taste test of all three search engines and pick your winner.

That’s all the site does—remove all the branding and layout and provide straight-up search results from three sites, with voting buttons on each column. That can be pretty helpful in a few ways. For one thing, it helps out anyone looking to beat their laziest tendencies when doing some deeper net research. On another level, it’s both a cool experiment and, possibly, helpful push to consider another search engine in your day-to-day routines.

That all depends on what you’re searching, though, and how the results turn out. In some cases, the results are simply switched up in order, and in most searches, Wikipedia still dominates in the top three positions. After serving up nearly 560,000 searches, the creator—who discloses that he’s a Microsoft employee, but running the site as an independent project—wrote on July 31 that the voting results ran like this:

Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%

Interesting, to say the least, but it’s the sort of site where one would try to get oddball results and test the parameters, and the audience is definitely a select sample.

Hit the link for the search app, along with a Search Accelerator for Internet Explorer 8 and an Open Search plug-in for browsers like Firefox. Most of all, tell us what you find in your own results in the comments.

Blind Search [via This Week in Tech]