What’s Wrong with ‘Bing it on’? (or the bias of the study)

 

    Recently you may be seeing commercials for Bing, doing their challenge. They claim that people actually prefer Bing’s results over Google’s. So I decided to try this myself and see.

    I ended up picking Google 4 out of 5 times. Maybe it was just familiarity. Maybe it was because I was able to see through their tricks. What I noticed (and this is smart on Bing’s part) is that they tend to put their ‘images’ higher up on the list. People like pictures.

    But the real kicker is what they don’t show you. During the ‘Bing it on’ challenge, they remove the ads. This is actually a big deal. What I have found is that Bing has a lot of ads.

    See? No ads shown. But when I searched them individually…

 

    No ads for Google this time. I did have a search result with 1 ad before this. But check that out! 4 things under the ‘ad’ section on Bing! This was pretty consistent. Bing would have 3-5 ads for most searches, while Google has 2 at most (from what I saw).

    I would wager that showing ads would influence outcomes. Especially when I would think a lot of people don’t like ads.

    Finally, just a note; the ‘Bing it on’ doesn’t account for Google’s habit of changing up results based on recent searches. While doing this test, I searched ‘Japan’ then ‘Mp3’.

    Through Google I got a few results that were ‘Japan-Mp3’ related. However this did not happen in the challenge.

    Now that I can spot the difference, I want that guy to come around to my area so I can win an Xbox…