Bing it On!
A couple years ago Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, started an advertising campaign called “Bing it On”. The advertisement claimed that in a blind test people preferred Bing to Google 2:1. Google has 67.6% of the market share while Bing only has 18.7%. Google Search clearly dominates the search engine market but is that because it is a more familiar brand than Bing? If Microsoft’s claim in true and Bing producing better ranked results then people should be switching to Bing. When I took the “Bing it On” I picked Google 4 out of 5 times although I did go in with the intention of trying to find search terms that Google would be more likely to rank better. Unable to overcome my bias I asked some of my friends and family to try it and found that they too preferred Google most of the time in this blind search test.
A Yale law professor decided to do his own study when he found out that Bing was not actually keeping track of the results and updating that 2:1 claim. In his study (linked at the bottom of this post) he found that people generally preferred Google 53% to 41%. In self-selected searches the difference was even greater and in the Bing-Suggested searches Bing managed to gain some ground.
In Bing’s attempt to advertise its page ranking system as better than or at least equivalent to Google’s I think it really made a mockery of itself. People were not going to be so overwhelmed by the search results to switch from Google to Bing. In fact people are probably more likely to switch from Bing to Google after taking this people if they were on the fence, seeing Google edge out Bing might be the deciding factor. Bing wanted to highlight a problem we discussed in class where people make decisions based on other’s decisions rather than making the choice you have well researched. Unfortunately in this case other’s people’s decisions match results of individual research.
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/BingItOn_Draft%209.pdf