Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Not all search engines are created equal and while Google has been the undisputed king for some years, perhaps Bing or even long-time Yahoo! is worth a try. A Microsoft employee has produced a blind search tool to help you find out just which one delivers the goods.
Microsoft developer Michael Kordahi has constructed BlindSearch or, as he likes to call it, “the search engine taste test.”
Use BlindSearch by typing in a typical web query. The application then returns three columns, being the top ten results as given by Google, Bing and Yahoo!.
The source of the results is not displayed and the order of the columns is random, so you do not know which engine delivered which set of results. This means you are not employing any subconscious bias based on any branding accompanying the results.
While you can simply click away at the 30 results given, BlindSearch encourages you to rate which column you believe had the best matches.
As soon as you indicate your preference, the search engine names are revealed and you can discover if your preferred search engine was the winner, or if you might consider it time to switch loyalties.
There are some minor deficiencies in BlindSearch, the most obvious being lack of localisation. All searches take place from the BlindSearch server and consequently are executed as United States searches originating from the U.S.
Additionally, other components of the search engine experience are missing, notably image thumbnails, cached results and other elements.
Nevertheless, it is an interesting application and may change your views on search engine performance.
Kordahi encourages feedback and points out while he works for Microsoft this is not a Microsoft project and has no bias towards Bing.
David Bass
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How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
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