The next wave of the Bing it On Challenge has arrived. Now Bing has taken their side-by-side comparison challenge out of Google's back yard and into the front lines of Kansas, where Google is bringing super-fast Internet to the masses.
As Google rolls out its Fiber service in Kansas, Bing has moved into Topeka, just a short drive down I-70 with an offer of their own. The Bing it On Challenge has apparently left Google’s backyard of San Francisco and have taken the Bing it On Challenge to the front lines of Google’s quest to bring speedy Internet to the masses.
Calling it the next wave of the Bing It On Challenge, Bing has tossed out a lot of data suggesting that people continue to be surprised when they realize they choose Bing over Google and how “impressed” they are with Bing’s results.
The Bing It On Challenge began last fall. The side-by-side comparison, pitting Bing results verses Google results, was the spawn of a survey conducted by a third-party research firm.
In the original survey, 57.4 percent of the 1,000 respondents chose Bing over Google. Bing followed it up with man-on-the-street live tests in front of rolling cameras in the San Francisco Bay area.
Since then, Bing launched a series of commercials promoting “people prefer Bing over Google.” Their message is simple: Bing results are preferred. Break the habit and give them a try. They also released new data around ongoing testing and results.
Selecting the city that renamed itself Google for a day in hopes of winning the bid for Google Fiber, Bing let their test loose on the streets of Topeka. In the video, one man even refers to his city as Google, Kansas.
They’ve also changed both the BingItOn.com site and the challenge, itself. The challenge site’s home page offers other reasons to choose Bing, including their “smart and always fresh” home page, video previews and translation service. The challenge now includes trending searches to get you started, in an attempt to show that that they, too, have up-to-date trends.
It’s interesting to note that Bing has added the phrase “for the web’s top searches” when talking about how people prefer Bing. The footnoted comment on BingItOn.com notes:
Based on a comparison of web search results pane only; excludes ads, Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Clearly the campaign is based on results, not the overall search experience. With all the resources Bing has put into their Social Sidebar, it’s interesting to see the campaign continue to be strictly results-based. With more social changes expected in the near future, time will tell if the Bing challenge will change to reflect the overall search experience.