As a person living in the age of the Internet, you’ve probably said the words “I don’t know, I’ll Google it!” at least once. The Google search engine is such a powerful, widely-used Internet resource that its name has become synonymous with its function. “Google,” a bonafide verb, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, according to cnet.com. Google is a powerhouse, carrying out 67 percent of the Internet’s search engine use, according to comscore.com.
Bing, Microsoft’s response to Google, is the second-most popular search engine, but Bing only carries out 18 percent of web searches, says comscore.com. In order to presumably boost this statistic, Bing launched a campaign in 2012 to try to dismantle Google as the Internet’s preferred method of searching, according to theverge.com. This campaign, cleverly titled the “Bing it On” Challenge, had users search for a term and choose which search results they preferred without knowing which results came from which search engine. The test works by giving participants side-by-side results of five different searches then gives participants the choice of which set of results they prefer.
At the end, they receive a list of the terms searched and which search engine was selected for each, and a winner is declared. The ads outline how the “Bing it On” Challenge works and claim that in these blind comparison tests, users choose Bing over Google by nearly 2:1. For some, including myself, these results are hard to believe. That’s a pretty big claim to make, especially against the most-used search engine on the Internet.
A Yale University law professor named Ian Ayres found these ads to be “a little fishy,” so he conducted his own research, as reported by huffingtonpost.com. According to their study, Ayres and his team found that “a statistically-significant majority of participants preferred Google search results to Bing search results (53% to 41%).” His team also found that the preference for Bing went up when participants were using terms suggested by the bingiton.com website rather than terms they decided upon themselves. Ayres concluded that because he believes his study was conducted on a similar sample size to that of Bing’s published findings and he was unable to replicate Bing’s results, Microsoft’s claims that Bing is the superior search engine may be false and could warrant legal action.
Curious to see if I fit in with the findings of the Yale team, I undertook the “Bing it On” challenge myself. As a frequent user of Google’s services, I must admit that I was skeptical of Bing’s claims. I was interested to see if the suggested search terms by Bing made a difference as well, so I took the test twice–once with terms suggested by the bingiton.com site and once with my own search terms.
The first time through, Bing suggested that I search “Cory Monteith,” “elephant kills zookeeper,” “Nobel Peace Prize,” “Doctor Who” and “woman gives birth on lawn.” Bing won this round, as I chose the Bing results for every search term but one–Google won the round with Doctor Who. The text on the results page read “Hey, look at that. Bing won! Not surprising. Wherever we go, people prefer Bing for the web’s top searches.” I remained skeptical, sure that I would prefer Google when I provided my own search terms.
After doing some other work in order to give myself some time between tests, I returned to complete the second half of my experiment. I thought of the search terms myself this time, searching “Game of Thrones,” “United States Postal Service,” “iPhone 5S,” “inventor of Post-it Notes” and “poisonous snakes.” Surprisingly, at least to me, Bing also won four of the five searches with “inventor of Post-it Notes” being the only Google win.
I was surprised. I was expecting results very similar to the Yale study in that I would prefer the Bing results for the terms they suggested but not for terms that I came up with on my own. I was definitely not expecting Bing to win by such a landslide with Google clinching only one win in each test. Perhaps I am an outlier, and my results are uncommon. My own results are not enough to definitively say whether or not Bing really is preferred over Google at 2:1–one girl’s search engine preferences do not equal a scientific study. But, I can’t say the ads were blatantly false–I did prefer Bing.
If Bing is padding their statistics and my results are more uncommon than Bing has led people to believe, Ayres’ claims that his study “might provide the basis for a viable Lanham Act claim by Google.” The Lanham Act, according to the Cornell University Law School, is the federal statute that governs unfair competition as well as protects against trademark infringement. Ayres believes that Google could invoke this particular statute against Bing “for making advertising claims with misleading ‘necessary implications’” and make a case for false advertising.
For more definitive proof, more studies like Ayres’ should be conducted and compared. If the results of the Yale study are accurate, similar studies should yield similar results, and a few studies claiming Bing’s results are inaccurate would make much more substantial evidence than a single study.
Samantha Bloom can be reached at samantha.bloom@spartans.ut.edu