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Much like the Cola Wars of the ’80s proved that brand loyalty trumps taste, so too is the search engines’ battle for the hearts and minds of Web users as much about brand as it is about relevancy.

Back in April of this year Barry Schwartz (aka rustybrick) started a thread at Search Engine Watch proposing a test to rate search engine results.

His company built a white label search engine to let users rate the returned search results. It’s not the most user-friendly application and it doesn’t tell you which search engine’s results you picked. So I recommend using the Webmaster Brain version. In this relevancy test, you rate the top three results as a set, instead of each results separately. And it will tell you whose results you picked.

I took the challenge to see if my biases (and actual marketshare) reflected the actual quality of the SERPs. Ten searches later — mostly two- and three-word phrases, and one single-word search; a couple of people names, a product for sale, and some random things — here’s what I found.

• Three times Yahoo had the most relevant top 3 results.
• Twice Google had the most relevant top 3 results.
• Once Google and MSN tied.
• Once Yahoo and MSN tied
• And once there was a three-way Google/MSN/Yahoo tie.

I’d say there was no hands-down winner based on my test searches, although when conducting a real search I tend to evaluate more than just the top 3 results.

Perhaps Microsoft’s Gates was right when he said his search engine’s results were “at least as good” as the big G’s. But then again, in blind taste tests more people actually did prefer the taste of New Coke.