A couple of weeks back I posted about Goofram, a site which takes both Google and Wolfram Alpha search results and places them side by side. Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi came up with a somewhat similar idea, but gave it an experimental ‘blind taste test’ twist: display search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo on the same page – but don’t give the user any clues as to which one is which – and let them choose which results were the most relevant. Try it for yourself.

8 weeks later and he’s posted some results on his blog, and as somebody who works a lot with Google and thought that Bing wouldn’t stand a chance against the almighty yardstick of search, I was a little surprised by the results.

From 559,239 search queries, the experiment showed that Google was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top choice as the engine that gave the best results, with 41% of the vote. But following closely behind were Bing at 31% and Yahoo at 28%. I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t the only one surprised that Google’s results had not wooed the lion’s share of searchers: even users who were consciously trying to pick Google from the available results were left wondering how they had ‘accidentally’ chosen Bing.

So, does this spell the end of an era as Google is slowly usurped by search competitors? Well, the answer is… no. Google is still the first choice for those out there who do know which one they’re choosing, but it just goes to show that the alternatives probably aren’t that far behind. The influential Joy Of Tech continues to poke fun at the newly-forged Bing/Yahoo partnership, but for a webcomic that is fundamentally a four-panel leadup to an anti-Microsoft gag, that’s hardly surprising.

In his conclusions so far about the experiment, Kordahi does mention the surprise aspect of the results:

Many were surprised that Google wasn’t always their choice. There were many instances of surprise that Google wasn’t as superior as they thought it was.

Still, “hang on, I’ll Bing it” just doesn’t have the same ring to it…