I've seen this link a couple of times a while ago when Bing launched. Most commenters said: "Hey, look! In a blind test Yahoo and Bing are just as good as Google!". What they forgot, though, was that being just as good is not good enough for most of us to switch. Google didn't gain its market share by being just as good as HotBot and AltaVista. It did it by being much, much better.

If microsoft and yahoo are much worse than google, then they have 101 problems. If they are roughly as good, then they have 1 problem: Pushing it forward one bit more.

Anyway, I actually use different engines now and then, and for the most part they're all the same. For complicated/obscure stuff, google is still considerably better. For mom and pop I'm not sure that matters though.

Google's clearest advantage is its unbelievable speed, which is great for news/current topics. A test, here's a string that doesn't return results in google: conquistador monkey bakery laughter confusion fear hatred love citizen kane mantra manhatten mongrel montell carebear

(Yes I had to string together that many words. Carebear broke the fucker's back.)

Anyway, I'll check back and see how long it takes the various engines to pick it up. Google will be first. I predict about 30 minutes. It's 10:50 right now.

ED: 11:00 nothing; 11.11 nothing; 11:35 nothing (looks like my prediction was wrong); 12:31 nothing. Things are going horribly awry.

Works now for what it is worth:

Hacker News | If microsoft and yahoo are much worse than google ... ... doesn't return results in google: conquistador monkey bakery laughter confusion fear hatred love citizen kane mantra manhatten mongrel montell carebear ... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750236 - 10 hours ago - Similar -

I'm not sure about comments, but I have also noticed myself that Google can be surprisingly quick at picking up new submissions.

It already has the poll about whether yc startups use Django, Rails, PHP, or other.

ED: 1:32 nothing, 2:54 nothing.

Just now, ["search engine do you choose in the blind test"] does show this HN item, about place 16, as of "5 hours ago". So maybe you just missed out because it made its first visit before your comment.

Yep, I get that at position #11. It's strange because my test string is still nowhere in sight. Multiple indexes, I guess.

ED: 4:36 nothing; going to bed

ED: 11:35 google has it.

That is true. But google also got a lot of problems.

One of the biggest is spam. I hate it when you search for something and the site you get is just a listing of your search terms.

Google has some combination of your email, calendars, bookmarks, web browser, phone number, payment service, ad service, office suite, and physical phone. All of these make Google one click closer than any competitor. It's game over, at least for now.

Nearly always Google but sometimes Bing. Never Yahoo.

I was pretty shocked how hideous Yahoo's results are by this.. often "scraper" sites were appearing in the top 10, and eventually spam sites became a dead giveaway to which one was Yahoo. Eugh.

I had the exact opposite situation. 5 searches for random topics that I'd searched for in the last 3 days at Google, and I chose Yahoo 4 times and Bing 1 time, never Google. I didn't expect these results at all.

What sort of things? I was going with reasonably general, basic queries.. things like names of famous people, city names, and things like "[topic] blogs". I didn't go with anything longer than two words.

One particularly poor example was "ruby blogs" - see the results: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ruby+blogs - results 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10 are pretty irrelevant. On Google, the top 6 results, at least, are really solid.

Might have something to do with not respecting nofollow.

I consistently picked Yahoo results. But with Google I don't have to deal with all the garbage that surrounds Yahoo.

Bing and Yahoo's pages are either bloated with images and effects or overwhelmingly busy. I search with Google because of its fast and minimal interface. I'm not distracted by eye-catching advertisements or anything, and I get my results immediately. I could care less about slightly more accurate results.

Is this really blind? A lot of people would probably search for something they are used to searching on say google and can maybe recognize the search engine based on the order of the results.

Not sure who came first... I've been using http://bset.royans.net/ for the past few weeks.

Mostly google, sometimes yahoo, never bing.

This is eye opening.

I've always thought about this. Awesome seeing someone craft a study, even if it has its flaws.