With Microsoft's new "Bing It On" challenge, the company is going after Google head-on in the online search wars.
Microsoft is asking millions of Web searchers
to break their longtime Google search habits and give the software giant's Bing
search engine a new try in a catchy "Bing It On Challenge" that is
aimed at growing Bing's
market share in the search wars.
The
"Bing It On"
campaign was born out of a recent search study commissioned by Microsoft that
looked at user opinions on the search engines they were using and the accuracy
of the results they were getting, according to a post by Mike Nichols, chief
marketing officer for Bing, on the Bing Search Blog.
"A while ago, we began to notice an
interesting trend in our internal testing-for the first time our testing showed
that
Bing's
Web search results were better than Google's," wrote Nichols. "We
continued testing our results in several different ways as part of our regular
work to improve our quality, and along the way an interesting pattern
emerged-Bing was
regularly beating Google in Web search results
quality."
Those early findings inspired Microsoft to
dive deeper to find out what it meant.
"So, we asked an independent research
company to do a statistically significant similar challenge test and our
findings were confirmed-people preferred Bing Web search results nearly
2:1
over Google in blind comparison tests," wrote Nichols. "Since relevancy
of search results is the No. 1 driver of search engine preference, the time is
right for a wake-up call for searchers-better Web search results are available
at Bing.com."
With that, Microsoft is unveiling the
"Bing It On Challenge," a Web page where users are being encouraged
to see for themselves how their Web searches are being conducted side-by-side
by Bing and Google. The key is that both visible searches are not identified
with their Bing or Google logos. Once at the Website, users enter a search term
and are asked to judge which of the two search screens gives them the best
search results. After five "rounds" of side-by-side, nonscientific,
blind search comparisons, the site tells you which search engine you found most
useful-Bing or Google.
So what's the point of this blind "taste
test?"
"Our mission is to show people it's time
to break the 'Google habit' and that Bing has reached a quality level that will
make it easy to switch," wrote Nichols.
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