A couple of months ago, Microsoft conducted a research study where they found search engine branding had an impact on the perceived quality of results. Now, months later, Bing is launched and people are once again ranking the quality of search results. At first, there were direct side-by-side comparisons, but of course there’s no better challenge than a double-blind experiment.

Michael Kordahi, which I feel compelled to disclose is a Microsoft employee, has set up such an experiment, dubbed “BlindSearch” which you can try here. On the site, you enter a single search query which results three sets of unbranded results. After viewing the results, you are given an option to vote on one set of results, which then reveals the provider and adds it to the tally.

At the time of writing, Google is in the lead with the tally standing at “Google: 40%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 29%” out of 355 votes.

Update: Approximately half an hour after posting, Bing takes a slight lead over Google. (Google: 36%, Bing: 38%, Yahoo: 26% | 641 votes)

Update 2: A thousand votes later, Google and Bing are tied. (Google: 39%, Bing: 39%, Yahoo: 22% | 1757 votes)

Update 3: Three’s the magic number, for Google. (Google: 40%, Bing: 37%, Yahoo: 23% | 2554 votes)

Update 4: Google is taking a stronger lead with another thousand votes. (Google: 43%, Bing: 32%, Yahoo: 25% | 3520 votes)

Update 5: It appears the application has exceed Yahoo API’s daily limit. Michael is aware of the problem and looking for a workaround. Yahoo results has since been fixed.

From: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090607/bing-vs-google-vs-yahoo-blind-search-engine-test/

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If Wolfram Alpha was not enough to keep the Google team worried, Collecta thought to give another twist to the already complicated future of Google Search Engine.  Not only this, even specialized search companies like Jenni (A movie and tv shows search engine) have been taking some small pies of business away from Google. Anyways, the blog is about a new wonder child whose still in the line to rock the world! Its name is Collecta!

Collecta is a one of the first of its kind. Its a Real Time Search Engine. It can give you everything about a certain keyword as and when it happens.  So if you want to know latest updates about Maria Sharapova or about Swine Flu, you can only just type it into Collecta! Baaaang! The result is a live stream of results as and when they are uploaded to the world wide web. No matter if its a twitter update, any new comment with the your desired keyword, any news story or a picture posted at Flickr, Collecta will bring them all for you at one place. So now you don’t have to refresh the Google News page repeatedly to check the new updates on a fast developing story or glued your eyes to Twitter to check it our for latest information, all your need is just Collecta as it will Collect Each and Everything for you as its name suggests.

Below is the screen shot of the Collecta when i gave it a try. Collecta has given two keywords i.e Obama and Swineflu to test them on their Collecta Real Time Search Engine. The results were impressive. I got a lot of twitter updates and few link to other stories about Obama. Even few wordpress blog posts also appeared in the list. Another website tested the Collecta engine for its updation speed and they found it pretty satisfactory. In any case, its currently just looking for two keywords and hence we can expect such speed, the real test will come when million of people will be searching for wide variety of terms at the same time.

So lets keep our fingers crossed and lets hope to be the first to update this post when Collecta is available for our Collective usage. Gerry Campbell and his team deserves a loud applause.  Click here to visit the Collecta site

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