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Ask HN: Is Bing really better than Google?

6 points by MarkMc ↗ HN
The folks at Bing have said, "To track our progress, we conducted tests that removed any trace of Google and Bing branding. When we did this study in January of last year 34% people preferred Bing, while 38% preferred Google. The same unbranded study now shows that Bing Search results now have a much wider lead over Google's. When shown unbranded search results 43% prefer Bing results while only 28% prefer Google results." [1]

My question is: Has any one else done this sort of study? If so, what were the relevant percentages? (And is there any trend over time?)

[1]: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/10/spend-less-time-searching-more-time-doing-introducing-the-new-bing.aspx

2 comments

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daveasdf
A few years back (6 months before the first Bing study in the article) Michael Kordahi developed a site "Blind Search" that anonymised search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and put them side by side, letting users vote which they preferred.

The site (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/) now seems somewhat-defunct, with Yahoo results failing show. Aggregated results posted mid-2009 (http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=839) (a little earlier than the original study) show Google on 41%, Bing 31%, Yahoo 28%, however.

As a purely non-scientific anecdote, I personally used the Blind Search website for a month mid-2011, preferring Google around 75% of the time, Yahoo 15% and Bing 10% of the time. (The latter two are interesting, because Yahoo is presumably using Bing's engine behind the scenes.) I probably don't represent a "typical user", however, as most of my queries are programming-related, which perhaps some search engines have better optimised for than others.