Bing v Google

Microsoft is focusing a lot of effort on web and cloud based technologies, trying to diverge from their existing model of software installed on local PC's. This is a laudable goal, and is probably imperative given the way things are going. I'm actually a big fan of Microsoft's product, much to the affront of Open Source fanboys around the world, but that's just the way it is. I write in TSQL (SQL Server's dialect of SQL), I dabble in C#, I run Windows, and more.

Now unless you've been living under a rock or the oppressive heel of a World of Warcraft subscription, you've probably seen Microsoft's ads for IE9, Windows 8, and of course Bing.

Bing.

If you haven't yet, I'd go take the "bing it on challenge" to get more of an idea of what I'm talking about. Plus then I don't have to explain how it works. I'd also recommend reading Microsoft's explanation of the study.

The key findings of the study were the following:

"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.*

*The overall sampling error rate for the study is +/- 3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level."

As they say, the outcome is clear... ish. Ignoring the "draw" votes Bing won. There are certainly flaws in the study, but given that everyone on earth knows what google looks like, there are limitations to how the studies can be performed.

select 57.4 / 30.2 --1.9:1 select 54.4 / 33.2 --1.6:1 select 60.4 / 27.2 --2.2:1

But not to sound cynical, but who cares? There are more reasons people use Google than the sorting algorithm. Sure, if Google's algorithms were garbage, it might matter to the end user, but they're not. If we were to base our decision on which search engine was better based solely on this study, then Bing would be superior. But by how much? Google is great, Bing is greater. I also have a Gmail account. and a blogspot blog (a google product). I use youtube. I use google docs. I say "google it". I don't have nearly that much invested in Microsoft technologies when it comes to my web based suite of products. there's just not enough motivation to me to change from Google to Bing.

I think the main goal of this campaign by Microsoft was to try to remind people that Bing was there, and hope they can convert or incept enough users to make it a contender with Google. Will it work? In my opinion, no.