A press release just made public covering research by Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology. It's a very succinct write-up, so I'll just quote bits of it:

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

The whole premise of the press release is that this observation is the result of brand power for both Google and Yahoo!. It's an interesting observation, and certainly makes sense, but I'm still not 100% convinced. The sample size is too small and as the researchers noted, "many of the participants said they used Google to search". The very next thing they need to try is to recruit MSN/Live users to do the experiment. If their hypothesis is true, the MSN/Live users would rate MSN's results top.

Regardless, an interesting note that could explain a lot of the momentum behind the top SEs.

Technorati Tags: search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, research