Bing is not keeping track of the results from the Bing It On tool, which lets users decide whether they like Google’s or Bing’s results better for any given query. Despite all of the numbers Bing threw around in a blog post on Tuesday, Bing didn’t actually say what percentage of people chose Bing over Google when using the tool. When asked about this, we received the following statement from Bing General Manager Adam Sohn:
“We aren’t keeping track of the results from the Bing It On tool, because it’s non-scientific and was intended to be a fun way for customers to experiment with both search engines, seeing web search results side-by-side from both Bing and Google, hopefully noticing the progress Bing has made over the past few years.”
Interesting. I thought the point was to show that “people choose bing web search results over Google nearly 2 to 1 in blind comparison tests.” That’s actually just from the Microsoft-commissioned study Bing pushes on the Bing It On homepage. I guess the actual results of the challenge are irrelevant.
If they’re not keeping track, and it’s just “a fun way for customers to experiment with both search engines,” why bother to put out stats (like those in this week’s blog post), such as:
The whole thing is really about marketing. In fact, the company was very up front about this in the beginning, as it launched an ad campaign around it, spanning online and television, which debuted during the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s about marketing. Not stats. If it were about stats, Bing would be “keeping track”. It just seems like if you’re going to use stats for your marketing, you might want to keep track of the results of the campaign.