Flour Power

Blind Search is a very simple website that does just one thing. Given a search query it presents the search results returned by Bing, Google and Yahoo and displays them side by side in 3 different columns, presenting them with the same styling, to remove any identifiable properties. The user chooses which results are the best, votes for that search engine by clicking the corresponding button and then the source is revealed.

At the time of writing, the page that shows the voting results has been taken down because some “douche is gaming the system”, but while it was up there were a lot of changes in the classification, which indeed suggests some kind of manipulation.

So far my results have been spread around the 3 engines, with Google and Bing very close and Yahoo bit behind the other 2. But, as the author (Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee, although he claims Microsoft has nothing to do with it) points out, the site is still an experiment, and very limited, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt:

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.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how search engine branding has an impact on the perceived quality of results. I would expect my choice to be Google most of the times, but it seems the search results from both Bing and Yahoo are not very different. But still, Google was the only one to return this blog when I searched for “Flour Power”, so they still have my loyalty.

Try it yourself and let me know what you think.