Does it matter which search engine is used? A user study using post-task relevance judgments

TL;DR

This study compares Google and Bing in a user experiment, revealing Google’s superior relevance performance and user reliance, with relevance judgments influenced by task difficulty and result quality.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on search engine performance and user relevance judgments in real-world tasks, highlighting differences between Google and Bing.

Findings

Google produced more relevant results than Bing

Users relied heavily on Google for search

Relevance judgments were affected by task difficulty

Abstract

The objective of this research was to find out how the two search engines Google and Bing perform when users work freely on pre-defined tasks, and judge the relevance of the results immediately after finishing their search session. In a user study, 64 participants conducted two search tasks each, and then judged the results on the following: (1) The quality of the results they selected in their search sessions, (2) The quality of the results they were presented with in their search sessions (but which they did not click on), (3) The quality of the results from the competing search engine for their queries (which they did not see in their search session). We found that users heavily relied on Google, that Google produced more relevant results than Bing, that users were well able to select relevant results from the results lists, and that users judged the relevance of results lower when they regarded a task as difficult and did not find the correct information.