Here is an interesting concept; a site called Blind Search created by Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi as a free time exercise removes all the branding from three of the most popular search engines.

Google, Yahoo and the much talked about Bing are used to generate search results which are displayed in three columns, from those results you are asked to see which are the most relevant and vote for the best.

Me and two other colleagues have been trying this frequently over the last couple of days and have been quite surprised that three ‘tech-savy’ people have most of the time voted for the Bing results to the best for each of our searches.

I’m a long term user of Google so these results have come as a surprise as I always thought I would be able to pick the results out. We have checked the results with the actual search engine used and each time they have been correct.

Obviously this doesnt include any of the addition extras which each of the search engines provide but it goes a long way to showing that a strong brand can equate to a lot of peoples perception these days.

I recommend you giving it a try, you maybe quite surprised.

If you want to try it out and check the results for yourself, remember to use the .com variants of Google, Bing and Yahoo as this facility is not location specific and only uses the US search servers.