Taking a hint from the soft drink world, Bing is challenging the public to a ‘taste’ test. Bing’s opponent? The reigning search king Google.
The challenge, cleverly titled Bing It On, invites web users to participate in a five-round blind search challenge. It’s simple enough – simply search any term, person, place or thing you want and then a side-by-side screenshots of the results you would get from Bing and Google are presented. Both are presented in the same format and are unlabeled, encouraging participants to choose the page with the most relevant results on results alone. After five rounds, the user to presented with the results and which search engine they preferred in each round.
The object of the challenge is to further prove findings that people preferred Bing web search results nearly 2:1 over Google in blind comparison tests, and to encourage swayed users to commit to using Bing. This, of course, follows Bing’s revamp which allows users to engage with friends while browsing search results and the introduction of the Bing content qwiki.
I took the Bing It On challenge and (spoiler alert) found out I narrowly prefer Google’s results. Of the five topics I searched, two results were a draw, two I chose in favor of Google and one I chose in favor in Bing. Is this enough to make me consider using Bing instead of Google for my search needs? Probably not. But will this help bring more users to the Bing camp? It’s possible.
Have you taken the Bing It On challenge? Has it swayed you one way or the other? Share your thoughts with us.
