Take the Coke and Pepsi Wars and Insert Search
October 20, 2013
Basic economics tells us that brand rivalry prevents a complete monopoly on a free-based market. The quintessential examples are Pepsi and Coke, but let us make the metaphor more modern with a comparison between Bing and Google. EWeek takes a look at Bing’s new claim that its search is more popular than Google in “Is The Bing It On Challenge A Little Off?” The “Bing It On Challenge” supposedly compared Google and Bing search result side-by-side and stripped of their branding. It showed that users preferred Bing 2:1. Yale professor Ian Ayres found these results questionable, because he found the results to be mostly identical.
When Microsoft was asked to share their data sets, they refused to release their results. Ayres got even more peeved when he found out how they collected their information and decided to run his own test:
“Admitting to being “slightly annoyed” in discovering that the claim was based on a study of a mere 1,000 participants, he said that he enlisted Yale law students to run an experiment using a similar sample size and the BingItOn.com Website. We found that, to the contrary of Microsoft’s claim, 53 percent of subjects preferred Google and 41 percent Bing (6 percent of results were ‘ties’),” reported Ayres. Secondary tests, which involved randomly assigned participants and a mix of popular, Bing-suggested and self-suggested search terms, failed to come close to Bing’s 2:1 advantage.”
Then the claim comes in that the results were not shared because they are not tracked and that results in the challenge were slanted in Bing’s favor. Microsoft burned itself on those two. Basic scientific method research would toss this test in the kindling pile immediately. No results or favoritism at all? One fact about marketing is that advertisements cannot make claims without proof. Oh boy! We are back on the Coke and Pepsi blind-fold taste test. Which search results belong to which search engine?
Whitney Grace, October 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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