I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better results.

Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another.

I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your search terms will not be enough.

"It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another."

Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Pepsi is far sweeter. It wins on taste tests, whilst Coke wins in some tests where people drink an entire can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars

I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...

You can tell even by the smell. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.

Just to clarify, I suppose you mean people thought the Google site with the Yahoo results was better than the Yahoo site with the Google results?

Google is a brand. Some people automatically think it's better.

All sets of top ten results were from nytimes.com. The layout was almost the same, in fact it looked like Google and Yahoo were based on the same template. The speeds for yahoo and google were basically the same. Microsoft seemed a tiny bit slower, but they didn't mention the actual speed of the search, so I don't know for sure. The number of results were different. Microsoft had 1.8million, Google had 32million, and Yahoo had 59 million. Google had a mini search bar under the first result, nytimes.com, that let you search in the site. That feature is nice. Even though the sites are almost identical, I still preferred Google's results. The other sites seemed ugly.

I'm not sure why that is. It could be that I have used Google for awhile, and just gotten used to their format. Or, it could be that Google does more effective research on how users interact with the site.

For example, I remember seeing the video from Google tracking eye movements while searching. The eye movements were mainly focused on the top left corner of the search result. Yahoo's site design interfered with that eye movement. They have a giant red Yahoo in the top right corner. It stands out, and I think it is annoying and distracting.

But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google.

I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.