Linda posted on September 03, 2009 10:10
Back in June, Microsoft released its new search, Bing, which it referred to as a 'decision engine'. I wrote about the announcement and gave my first impressions of Bing here. I've used it a few times, noticed that it is now the default start page for the browser on my phone, but mostly just kept on using Google.
A week or two ago, I ran across a blind search comparison at www.blindsearch.fejus.com. So I thought I would try it out to see which search I really liked the best.
The site lets you enter your search terms and then displays three columns of results. One is from Google, one is Yahoo and one is Bing. The aren't labelled and their positions move around, so you can't be sure which one is which. I tried a search phrase or two and discovered that the results aren't near as different as I thought they were. Typically, the same sites were showing near the top, although the order might be somewhat different.
I also discovered that I was about as likely to pick Bing as having returned the best results as to pick Google, which I am happy to tell you is still my search engine of choice.
As of a month ago, the site had been live for about 8 weeks. There had been approximately 560,000 searches entered, and Google had been selected 41% of the time. Bing was chosen 31% of the time and Yahoo made up the final 28% of the time. I think I only selected Yahoo once, and that was because it had returned KI Technology Group as one of the results when the others did not!
Since Google has a search market share of 65% to 70%, the numbers would suggest that there is a lot of loyalty to Google. While the issue early on may have been that Google returned better results, that is probably not the case today. Apparently many of us use Google just because that's what we have been using and we don't have any compelling reason to leave for another search engine.