Bing Tries Harder, But For Me, It’s A Draw

It’s not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices – you can pretend you’re not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis.

For years, Bing executives have privately complained about how hard it is to “break the Google habit,” even as they refused to market directly against Google. They were Avis, always trying harder.

No more. Today Microsoft announced its “Bing It On” challenge, a direct descendant of the iconic Pepsi challenge more than 30 years ago (the fact that I still remember that marketing campaign, and feel good about it, is a testament to its power).

It’s always a risk to ask consumers to test products blind, side by side, but Bing is doing it: Right here at “Bingiton.com.”

I bit and took the challenge – how did it go?

My first query has been my baseline for more than ten years – my own name (“john battelle“). Yeah, it’s a vanity search, but all of us have very strong opinions about what comes up when we put our names into search.

The winner? It was close, but Bing won. Its results seemed fresher – the Google screen had stuff about me from eBay and the BusinessWeek exchange in the first page (I never use eBay, and haven’t been active on that BusinessWeek page for more than two years). The Bing side also had my LinkedIn profile, which I consider important, though it also had an old picture of me flipping off the camera from 1998 (that’s getting very old), and a picture of a former business partner who isn’t me at all.

My second search – the misspelled (on purpose) “bset hotels sydney” made me question how the results were being delivered to the test site. Given how much I know about Google’s SERPs, it was pretty easy for me to tell which side was Google (it’s the left – the giveaway is the list of hotels with integrated reviews). But the results didn’t look quite like I was used to at Google. Here’s a comparison:

The main reason? This test had stripped out Google’s Maps feature for some reason, which certainly penalized the page from a visual and utility standpoint. Doesn’t seem like a fair fight.

So I gave that one a draw and moved onto another search.

Next up I tried a search I know both engines have had a bit of trouble with. I often lose the URL of my son’s boy scout troop, and have to search around for it a bit – it used to be buried in a nested Web 1.0 service, but recently was updated with its own URL, which unfortunately has terrible SEO. My first query usually doesn’t work, but it leads me in the right direction. It’s been a year or so since I’ve tried this (my son is older now), so I thought this might be a fresh search with some history to it. The query is “troop 43 larkspur california“.

The winner was most certainly Google. It found the old website (which has been impossible to find in the past) and the new one built in the last two years.

My next query was very utilitarian. My dad had a scare last night and is staying overnight at the hospital. I need to call the main line to check how he’s doing. So I entered “marin general hospital phone.” I figure if you put the word “phone” in there, the search engine should understand I need the phone number.

The Bing results had the number in the snippet of the first result. Google had it broken out clearly, but as the fourth result. Again, I know on Google I always get a map. But there was no map in these results. Also, I know that Bing prides itself on breaking out phone numbers, but I didn’t see the familiar Bing phone breakout box. Oh well, I had to go with Bing, because the information I needed was surfaced in the first result.

So going into my last search, it was two for Bing, one draw, and one for Google.

 

My last test was “winter rentals stinson beach” – a search I’ve done recently – and with some frustration – as I am taking a place there to write over the winter. I know what good results look like here, given I’ve done a lot of poking around already. It was relatively easy for me to pick a winner. It was Google, which filtered out most of the single home entries (I don’t want to find one home, I want to find listings with lots of them) and it also highlighted services and a local realtor I happen to know has the best inventory in the area.

So for me, the test concluded as a draw – two wins for Bing, two for Google, and one disqualification. Not exactly the two-to-one ratio in favor of Bing that Microsoft claims is the average, but then again, not bad either.

Remember, this is an entirely non scientific and subjective “test.” And of course, this test by its nature must exclude any personalization, search history, or other important bells and whistles that search engines use to tailor results to ongoing clients.

In the end, Bing proved to me that it deserves to be considered equal to Google for a variety of use cases. I don’t know if that’s enough to break the Google habit, but it certainly will get folks talking. And that’s an important part of marketing, isn’t it?!