BlindSearch

The recent Yahoo-Microsoft search deal inspired the BlindSearch search engine comparator. Michael Kordahi, the creator of this cool site, posted the results of his experiment here. In short the results till Aug 10 2009 are as follows:

Query count: 559,239
Results: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%

I decided to take this out for a spin myself and see if my experience was in line with the above. Here are the searches I tried:

1. digital camera deals
2. offline word list unix
3. java 1.6 docs
4. cheap new york hotels
5. jquery docs
6. words beginning with Q in english

Google returned me the best results for all but the last query. Yahoo was better with "words beginning with Q in english".

Now, to be fair I think the phrases above might not be what most others search for as is evident from the list of top searches on the site, but hey this was my test drive to see what I would get. I think I agree that a single company's search hegemony is not such a great idea for the web in general, but I think I'll stick with Google search till someone proves to me that their search is superior to Google's.