A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on this blog about Bing’s latest ingenious marketing campaign, ‘Bing It On,’ in which Microsoft asked people to partake in what was essentially a blind taste-test for search engines. Well, one month has now passed, and the results of the test are in.
Microsoft has said that more than five million people took part in the challenge, with the majority of those participants favouring Bing’s results.
Here’s what the guys from Bing said in an official blog post:
We asked for people’s impressions of Bing before taking the Challenge and then after they completed it. What we found was 64% of people were surprised by the quality of Bing’s web search results. Over half of the people surveyed indicated their impression of Bing improved after seeing Bing’s web search results next to Google’s. Additionally, of people who identified Google as their primary search engine, 33% said they would use Bing more often after taking the Challenge and 17% who found Bing more favorable after taking the side-by-side comparison said it revealed flaws in Google’s results.
The results come from a survey of around 4,700 people who took on the challenge, so they do not really gauge full public opinion, but they are nonetheless positive for the Microsoft search engine.
Building on the success
Bing It On has been a very clever marketing campaign on the part of Microsoft, and the results vindicate their efforts. The question is, can Bing use these results to attract users away from Google?
In his blog post, Bing’s chief marketing officer Aarav Franklin admits that it will be hard for people to stop using Google, “Of course, the ‘Google habit’ is strong in many people and habits don’t change overnight. We are working very hard to continue improving the quality of our results (from Web search to adding new useful information from your social networks) and to make the distinctions between Bing and Google clear so you can make an informed choice.”
4,700 surveyed people from a total of more than five million is too small a number to really tell how people perceived Google in relation to Bing. Many of those who participated in the survey will be guilty of doing what so many of us do: not following through with their pledge to use Bing more, despite how they answered the survey.
Google currently has an 85 percent share of the search engine market, and although Bing’s results highlight the quality of the Microsoft search results, they will do little to break the ‘Google habit’.
