MSN Outperforms Google and Yahoo… ???

Chris Sherman over at SEW posted what I thought was an interesting find about some tests done by a web marketing and research firm: MSN Bests Google & Yahoo in Search Shootout.

Susan Kuchinskas over at The 360 sums up the tests well…

MSN bested the top two search providers, along with Ask, AOL, Gigablast and Wisenut, when all five factors were considered: relevancy, freshness of content, failure rate, difficult search results, and non-organic or extra features.

I started to get a little excited and hopeful for MSN, because I like to root for the underdog. So, I kept clicking and reading…

The tests were done by some company called Intralink and it looks like they created a unique website - SEOResourceCenter.com - entirely for the findings of their tests.

Once I started reading through the site, I was immediately turned-off by all of the misspellings and piss-poor grammar. (I like to think that my grammar is fair and I wouldn’t put up a big argument if you say it is poor, but go check out their site and you will know what I mean…)

It didn’t take very long to see that these tests were as scientific as voting on Hot or Not. Their research consisted of measurements like “bonus,” “slight reduction,” “major reduction,” and “4 exact matches doesn’t way [sic] much more than 3.”

The kicker is that the graphs clearly show MSN on top and they conclude that they are “surprised” about how MSN performed, but Google is the best search engine because:

The people vote and right now they’re voting for Google. With a distinct advantage in market share it’s hard to argue with them… Here’s the bottom line. Many have accused Google of an emperor’s new clothes situation. No one wants to say he’s not wearing any, or that Google just doesn’t deliver relevant results. This is simply not true.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’ll give them a break since they are from Ohio.