Microsoft’s highly-anticipated Bing.com debuted recently, and Microsoft is reportedly mounting a massive ad campaign to promote it, so I decided to conduct a completely random, non-scientific, borderline unfair test of Google vs. Bing.
Based on some current client work, I wanted to locate articles that talked about successful launches of Ning sites–that is, the social network platform that allows anyone to create thier own social networking communities. So I fired up both Google and Bing and typed, “successful Ning sites”
Now I realize this is a fairly ambigous phrase. Successful how? But if Google or Bing could read my mind, they’d know I meant successful in the sense that the resulting site got a lot of people signing up, participating and generally staying engaged (making money helps too).
The results? Well, both search engines gave similar results, but Bing seemed to work more like a reference tool for the term “Ning” than give me actually relevant results around what constitutes a successful Ning website. In the top results were ning.com, the Wikipedia entry on Ning, and a couple Ning websites. Google on the other hand, had at least 3 articles on page 1 that were inline with what I was looking for–while not perfect, at least I was able to glean some valuable information.
OK, so winner: Google. And yes, it is a completely unfair one minute comparison. However, how many chances do you think people testing Bing out will give it? That’s right: one. For all Microsoft’s millions of dollars in Bing promotion, they’re only going to have one shot to get this right. Personally, I don’t think Google has much to worry about.
