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Great points.

This guy ( http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209 ) mentions that users prefer bing results over google results when the put a google logo above them (no source cited, tho). That's got to be maddening... But yeah, it's a brand problem as much as it's a product problem.

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I would be interested to hear which results users prefer when there are no logos at all. I did a blind search engine test about the time that Bing launched, and oddly enough for the queries I tried, I picked Yahoo (pre bing) as having the best results most often.

I still use Google though, so maybe it really is all about the logo for me...

The queries people do when testing a search engine are very different from the queries they do in real life. For starters, the first thing people do to test a search engine is to search for their own name.

Blekko's "search engine monte" provides blinded results from their own search as well as from Google and Bing [1], so you can perform your own experiments.

1. http://blekko.com/ws/hacker+news+/monte

All I know is that at school when I'm on public computers, sometimes I'll accidentally use bing without noticing, do a couple queries, get frustrated by not finding the link that I'm looking for (often a course website), notice I'm using bing, and switch over.

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