Launching search engines leaderboard

I’ve been curious for a while: do people actually prefer certain search engines when they can’t see the brand, or is it mostly “I like Google” kind of thing?

Since I couldn’t find a good way to test this, I built Search Bench. It’s like the LLM Arena, but for search engines.

It works like this: you enter a query, see two result sets side-by-side with engine names hidden, and pick which one you prefer (or mark them as similar). After that, the engines are revealed. Right now it compares Google, Brave, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and Bing.

Votes are aggregated into a public leaderboard using a Bradley–Terry model. More details on the project page.

One thing I noticed early on: initially Brave was at the top, but as more people voted, Google moved to first place. Curious to see if that holds.

Obviously this isn’t an objective ranking — queries and voters are self-selected, and preferences are subjective. But that’s kind of the point: I want to see what happens when you remove the brand.

If you have a minute, try it out.