Real Estate Blog - Going Blind with Search Engines

Image by betancourt via Flickr

Helped by an always changing background image, Bing is visually beautiful. The recent launch of Bing and the subsequent media blast has Bing pushed to the front of our daily conversations. Radio, TV, internet, and banner ads; it’s all about generating the Buzz. Bing has Buzz. Before Bing was released a full 90% of my Search Engine traffic came from Google. I did happen to notice one Bing result prior to it’s release. Is Bing going to be a real player? Only time will tell.

Bing is touting itself as a Decision Engine, a site that cuts the crap and only delivers the relevant sites for your search terms. Does it?

Don’t wine about it

Back in my days of heavy wine tasting (sommelier training) when it came time to evaluate a wine there were many things that flooded your senses. In tasting a beautiful Bordeaux blend there’s the grapes (5) themselves, the color, the tannins, the bouquet, the fruit, the acid, and so on. All vital attributes to the quality of what was contained in my glass.

But there were other aspects that might sway my perceived decision. The bottle itself, the beautiful label, the foil and even the printing on the cork could serve to better embed a feeling of quality. Was that a false quality? Certainly sometimes it was, other times it wasn’t. The answer?

Go Blind!

A blind tasting meant sitting down to a table with just two things. The glass and the wine in the glass. Tasting the wine deprived of the marketing component meant you were judging the wine on it’s own merits.

Image by Vincent Ma via Flickr

We’ve established the marketing for Bing has been wonderful. The question is,

“How can you blind test a search engine?”

Easy!

Michael Kordahi, (@delic8genius ) created a simple search site that delivers the unbranded results from Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can find it at http://blindsearch.fejus.com Search for “Mike Mueller ” and you’ll find 3 very different results. Click on the Vote button and the three search engines will be revealed. For each search the columns are switched. Having a little fun, I searched for “Decision Engine” and “Why Bing?” just to see how skewed I could make it.

Go try Bing. It’s certainly beautiful. But before you decide that it’s the “Decision Engine” for you, try a blind taste test on your favorite search terms. Try entering your "keywords" and let me know what you think.