BlackboxSET – Blackbox Search Engine Testing

The launch of Bing has shaken the Google Kingdom a little bit. I for oneimage have been doubting my own support for Google’s search engine. And I know others who swear by Yahoo’s search engine which is a trust I don’t share. To make such testing easier, I’ve spent a few hours last night to create a tool which allows you to search something against the 3 top search engines and lets you decide which one is the best. At the end of the exercise you should be able to find out if you are doing the right thing by sticking with your personal search engine.

May the best search engine win.

Comments

Stoyan said…
this is very cool, dully tweeted and digged, hopefully you'll get enough data points for a solid conclusion.

A friend noticed an XSS vulnerability though, might be good to double check that you escape html entities in the search query.

Good luck with the project!
12:24 AM
rahul said…
I always used Google for search but these results just shaken my head. Out of 10 queries, 7 times Yahoo! was the best for me, only 2 times Google and Bing was just once.
Switching to Yahoo!
1:32 PM
Diwakar said…
I couldn't really distinguish between Google and Y! in terms of search results - but Google is definitely faster then Y! - simpler and to the point. Google user since last 9 years - will happily stay so.
12:24 AM
admin said…
Diwakar, Thanks for the feedback. Which part of the world are you from ? Are you talking about search speed, or page rendering speed ? If Yahoo had a simpler launch page is that enough for you to think trying out Yahoo again ? I don't work for any of these companies, but I'm curious about what you said.

That being said, this site doesn't actually test the entire search engine features. The only thing its trying to do is figure out if the top 8 results returned are the best one or not.
12:35 AM
Jayanth said…
Admin, is there any way you can measure the the request time and show it on the page.

I couldn't figure out the faster engine from BlackboxSET. Also, I wouldn't say that only ONE engine is simpler and to the point, all three are very similar.

I chose the engine with most relevant results on the page as a winner. If they are the same, the one with the most relevant 1st or 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th. If I dont see a difference, I dont vote since there is no clear winner.

Hence I would suggest a Button - Similar Results. And show that on the pie chart as well.
2:30 AM
Mohan said…
I tried with a mix bag of simple web search and image search. Yahoo was the winner for my varied queries 4/5 times, while google was good on image search.
11:48 AM
BG Mahesh said…
It would be very useful to be able to configure the country for Google. I would like to compare results from google.co.in, yahoo and bing. Currently it is comparing with google.com, yahoo and bing
12:26 PM
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