Another Day, Another Bing-is-Better-Than-Google “Study”
By Ed Oswald | Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:32 pm
For the amount of time Microsoft spends lately beating us over the heads with how much better its Bing search engine is than Google, you’d think they would be in first place already. One of its latest examples is an effort by the Redmond company to convince us all that two-thirds of Google searchers would probably switch to its search engine if given the chance.
Microsoft has taken to its YouTube page for its latest schtick. In a three-minute video, the company says it recruited a “qualitative research firm” and had fifteen participants use Bing exclusively for a week. The company was not revealed as the sponsor of the study until after these folks told the researchers whether they’d stick with Bing or go back to their old search engine.
The video says that of the fifteen, ten indicated they would stick with Bing after the study.
Here’s the video, take a look, and catch where one of these participants delivers the line that Bing is the “newly improved Google,” boy isn’t that a line that sounds too much like Microsoft’s PR:
I am always very skeptical of studies sponsored by companies that show their own products are more superior to that of their competitors. Frankly, these can be rigged to give more positive results rather easily since those participants are likely not selected through any randomized process and are targeted for a result that would be beneficial.
You better believe that if Microsoft was spending money on this, they’d want people with a better chance of giving them the result they would want. There are plenty of Google users out there that aren’t as tied to using the search engine as others.
Also, I found it amusing that the bullet points that Redmond likes to pull out when talking about Google vis-a-vis Microsoft make it out of the participants they’re interviewing. It could be coincidental, but how do we know these folks haven’t been coached in any way?
Microsoft would be better served focusing on the search engine itself rather than what has seemed to become an endless stream of Bing-is-better-than-Google PR. Consumers are not as gullible as they used to be, and can see right through a lot of this kind of stuff.
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December 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 pm
You know it probably stings that they only viable way for MS to promote their product in video format is through the video service of one of their greatest rivals. I just find the irony delicious.
As far as me switching to Bing? Very unlikely. Everything Bing is doing for search can easily be patched into Google, and MS doesn’t offer me anything substantial to lock me into their service, while Google has Gmail, Reader, Wave, Goog411, Maps, Books, Blogger, Youtube, PS3MediaServer (via Google Code), and SOOOO much more!!
Microsoft has exactly nothing for me. Not even the Live network since I abhor the 360. Literally nothing ties me to them other than Windows 7.
December 4th, 2009 at 12:52 am
I would like to add that Google News is much better. I just tried for fun to check out Bing news and it is really a joke. The most interesting thing is that it did not find any news about Bing’s recent outage. Censorship or slow indexing? Both suggest that this feature is still utterly useless.
December 4th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Regardless of whether Bing is better than Google, any marketing person will admit that publishing such findings on one of the competitor’s media distribution sites is ironic on the surface but genius at its core. What better way to lure users from the competitor’s service to at least try the promotion themselves?
It’s curious though that the promotion was about search capability and not email, online productivity applications or news/media yet that is what people are responding with. Is Google’s search so unforgettable that it’s not even mentioned?
December 4th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Google is going down!!
Bing is so much better than the great omi god plex Google, in two years, Google will be wondering what happened to their market share.
There to busy killing businesses by banning adwords accounts and putting out phone crap. They have lost what made them good and there is big shift amongst those that made Google what it is.
Of course, you will always have fanboys that drink googleaid morning and night, like those that posted here earlier.
December 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Bing is definitely making up ground. It didn’t fizzle after the initial launch and marketing.