Shocking Search News
August 11, 2009
The Washington Post dropped a bomb shell next to the mine run off pond here in Harrod’s Creek a day ago. The Washington Post reprinted a TechCrunch write up that had been timing out for us. The headline? “Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?”
This search tool strips out all the branding, so you’re forced to really think about which results you like better. And early results showed a much more even distribution than Google’s 70% market share would suggest: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%. The score keeping feature was removed when people found a way to game it, but you can still run the test against yourself and see which search engine you really like the best. Too bad the one I seem to like will shortly be mothballed. The tool was created by Michael Kordahi, a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft.
I am nervous about quoting this much text from a newspaper, but I thought it was important to remind myself that Yahoo will become Bing.com and that the person creating the test works / worked at Microsoft.
I am still surprised by the fact that when Bing and Yahoo are added together, the combined score is bigger than Google’s miserable 44 percent. I had been drinking the Kool-Aid from various consulting firms that Google’s market share was more than 70 percent in Web search. Maybe these are two different scores? Heck. What difference does that make. For this golden moment in research, Bing and Yahoo have more moxie than the Google.
Stephen Arnold, August 11, 2009
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One Response to “Shocking Search News”
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It’s talking about opinions on search results, not a share. So combining the two won’t necessarily result in a higher number – in fact more likely to be an average if they did take bits from both systems rather than just pick the one (which they are doing)