Just days after the validity of the Bing It On Challenge faced serious questions, Microsoft has apparently decided that people have been without marketing pokes aimed at Google and kicked off another of its Bing It On advertising campaigns.
On the Bing It On UK site, you can elect to watch a video where Microsoft takes an actor into the streets of London and does a search test that involves taking “jumpers” from people whenever Bing defeats Google in a challenge.
Microsoft offers an explanation for the video:
Which search engine gives better quality results, Bing or Google? We know that many of you would likely answer Google – it’s time for that to change! We are delighted to announce that in blind tests, using the UK’s most popular web searches, more people picked Bing than Google*. See what happened when we took the Bing It On challenge to the streets of London. You may be surprised by the result!
Why the asterisk? Because the tests, which consisted of a sample size of 1,000 people and took place between December 2012 and June 2013, is based on web results only – stripping out things such as Google’s Knowledge Graph and ads.
It appears that Microsoft has spent good marketing money on proving that a some people would select a Bing search result over a Google one, if it was delivered in a vanilla format.
According to a Bing UK blog post:
Despite having used Google’s own top queries, after carrying out 10 searches, 53% of people surveyed picked Bing search results more often, 34% of people picked Google results more often, and 13% of people chose Bing and Google results an equal number of times.
For the stats geeks, the margin of error is +/- 3% at a 95% confidence level.
Even when you compare it by query, Bing was preferred more often. Out of 10,000 searches carried out, Bing search results were chosen 39% of the time, whilst Google results were chosen 32% of the time and 29% of searches were draws.
You can try it out for yourself by going to the Bing It On webpage and indulging it while it asks you to make five searches. We had a go, and Google won.
Bing of course offers its users a different background every day of the week. Google infamously shuns this with a white background, and occasionally indulgent Google Doodles.
This article was originally published on the Inquirer.