Bing has launched a brand new Web search challenge, aptly titled
"Bing It On," and is inviting searchers to choose for themselves
whose search results they would prefer: Bing's or Google's.
The Bing team, over the past several months, observed in their
internal tests that Bing was beating Google in search results
quality on a regular basis. So they commissioned Answers Research,
an independent research company, to conduct a study in order to
confirm their findings. The study revealed that people chose Bing
search results over Google nearly 2-to-1 in blind comparison
tests.
Based on this outcome, Bing is rolling out the Bing It On
Challenge, which lets you compare and choose between Bing and
Google search results side-by-side, except you don't know which
side of the results came from which search engine. All the
branding, ads and unique features such as Bing's Social Search and
Google's Knowledge Graph are removed to make it pretty much
impossible to find out which search engine provided which
results.
To take the challenge, all you have to do is go to
BingItOn.com and enter five search queries of your choice. For
each search query, you either select a winner or call it a draw.
When you're done, the final score and the winning search engine are
shown.
As you can see, in my case, Bing was indeed the clear
winner:
This challenge will also be part of a US-wide marketing
campaign. Ads will be seen online and on TV. Over the coming
months, the challenge will be featured in Microsoft Stores as well
as in pop-up stations.
Microsoft is also running sweepstakes from September
6th to October 18th. Prizes include an Xbox
360 + Kinect with Xbox LIVE, a Windows
Phone, and even a Surface
tablet with Windows RT. You can enter simply by tweeting or
retweeting this tweet. Note that,
as always, the sweeps are open only to US residents aged 18+.
Whether or not this challenge will make more people switch to
Bing, only time will tell. But what I can tell you is that
when you begin the challenge, you realize just how much progress
Bing has made over a comparatively short period of time, because
choosing between the two result sets can be really hard in many
cases.
Be sure to
try it out, it's fun! And tell us about your results in the
comments below.