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Re:Evaluating Bing with Mechanical Turk by gojomo on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @04:26AM (#650734)
I trust their statistical significance calculations... but at a glance, the distribution barely looks different from what I'd expect if the turkers picked at random (either on purpose or because search tastes are at some point arbitrary).

It'd be interesting to include such a graph, where all ratings are drawn at random (but with the same slightly-vs.-much proportions) for visual comparison.

Also: what would happen if all the individual queries on which the preference isn't statistically significant were discarded, or repeated until the preference becomes significant? (Or is "6-8 workers" enough for significance?)

Re:Evaluating Bing with Mechanical Turk by sker on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @04:51AM (#650749)
You have a point there. Also, what would happen if they show them both lists with results from Google? They would probably get similar results. Same for Bing, same for Yahoo.

From the test site that compared results from G, B and Y a few days ago, I felt the results were so similar that I couldn't bring myself to click one as the best engine because I didn't think I was making an objective choice.