I was cleaning my email inbox when I saw this one from Bing. It had a subject “We’re challenging Google head on.”
According to the peeps from Bing, they hired an independent research company called Answers Research based in San Diego, CA, to conduct a study using a representative online sample of nearly 1000 people, ages 18 and older from across the US. The participants were chosen from a random survey panel and were required to have used a major search engine in the past month. Participants were not aware that Microsoft was involved.
So how did it go?
In the test, participants were shown the main web search results pane of both Bing and Google for 10 search queries of their choice. Bing and Google search results were shown side-by-side on one page for easy comparison – with all branding removed from both search engines. The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph. For each search, the participant was asked which search engine provided the best results – “Left side search engine”, “Right side search engine”, or “Draw.” After each participant performed 10 searches, their votes were totaled to determine the winner (Bing, Google or Draw, in the case of a tie).
When the results were tallied, the outcome was clear – people chose Bing web search results over Google nearly 2:1 in the blind comparison tests. Specifically, of the nearly 1000 participants: 57.4% chose Bing more often, 30.2% chose Google more often; 12.4 % resulted in a draw.*
Microsoft is saying that Bing is giving search results based on facts and not based “[the users] habits.”
My comments:
- I think most people doesn’t know that Google search results is based on habits.
- Search results based on your habits means the information has already been filtered and some degree of “nonsense” has been removed – gives you faster search experience.
- I think the blind comparison test only shows that Google is still the “brand of choice” when it comes to online searches. That is, users have been accustomed to using google as their default search engine and only by not showing them what search engine their are using will they use other brands.
Microsoft needs to offer something new, fresh, and innovative so that they can lure users away from Google search and start using Microsoft as the default search engine most especially for windows PCs.
