Google Blogoscoped reports we have a new blind search taste test in town at blindsearch.fejus.com. The way this blind search test works is that you enter a query and you vote for the best search results without knowing who the search results came from.

Unfortunately, the site was hit by a guy who “gamed the system” and the data is currently skewed by that individual. They do promise to remove the fake data in the near future. In addition, the person who created the site works for Microsoft but claims this is not a “Microsoft initiative.”

This reminds me of a test I ran back in 2005, which I called the Search Engine Relevancy Challenge. I called the white-labeled search engine RustySearch and put search results from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN Search on the same page. Searchers could have rated each result, as opposed to rating the whole ten links at once. It appears this is still somewhat working with over 20,000 queries. I cannot wait to see the results from the Blind Search test.

Related Topics: Stats: Relevancy

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz