Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

I’m writing this article on Monday and scheduling it for a Thursday post. I HOPE the link stays live at least long enough for you to try it.

Check out Blind Search, which compares results for BING, Google, and Yahoo!. The tool was developed by a Microsoft employee but I found that it is a good test for which search results I like.

You type in a query and then pick the results you prefer. If you use queries you monitor regularly you’ll be able to figure out which search engines are which, but if you just randomly type in queries you’ll be better able to see where you really get the most relevant results.

For my tests I found that BING did indeed outperform Google and Yahoo!. What surprised me was that Yahoo! outperformed Google as well.

Why is that? One reason is that I am sick and tired of all the commercialized ad-laden crap Google pushes up in its search results. I recognize those sites now and try to avoid them like the plague.

Sometimes I want to see those sites when I know they organize information in a way that works well for me. Most of the time I am usually looking for something else and the blind search test tells me that Google is probably not the search engine I should be using.

On the other hand, you can use the tool to evaluate your optimization strategy. If you get very little traffic from Yahoo! and BING and your site doesn’t appear in the top results for queries where you’re in the top ten for Google, don’t blame Yahoo! and BING for your lack of optimization.

If the tool is no longer available by the time this article goes live, consider developing your own tool. Compare all the major search engines side-by-side and see which ones give you the best exposure. If you find a correlation between minimal exposure and minimal traffic, you know where you need to turn your optimization strategy to next.