Bing is squaring off with Google, asking people to test and rank results of searches done on both search engines.
You can try it yourself. Go to www.bingiton.com and you can try five searches. You will be shown the Bing results on one side of the page and the Google results on the other. For each, you choose right or left, and when you finish, you get a page that shows which search engine won.
Google was the winner for me, for what it’s worth, but Bing claims that people are choosing Bing 2 to 1. “Specifically, of the nearly 1000 participants: 57.4% chose Bing more often, 30.2% chose Google more often; 12.4 % resulted in a draw.*”
Bing won once for me, and I remember exactly why: the less useful side offered Amazon about four times, which really seemed excessive to me.
I was surprised to see Google win, though. Google is in this one with one hand tied behind its back, since it doesn’t include personalized results. Both options kept showing me Wikipedia.
From the point of view of SEO, it really doesn’t matter which one wins. Google brings the traffic, so Google is more important.
I wouldn’t switch from Google to Bing anyway, because Google provides an incredible wealth of free tools for business and education while Bing… well, it’s Microsoft, and I don’t have anything against them (love that Word, guys!) but they don’t go around improving the world.
Interestingly, the Bing blog believes that people use Google because they’re in the habit, and if only they would see how much better Bing is, they’d switch like a shot. I think that Bing has lovely pictures, and if people won’t switch for those photos, they’re not going to switch just because of this test.
Try it yourself. Two pages offering Wikipedia and Amazon aren’t really that different to me. Would you switch?
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