Despite a fairly active marketing campaign, Microsoft's Bing search engine is often perceived as a second to Google's. Now, the company hopes to establish itself as the search titan with the new "Bing It On" challenge.
Starting today, users can hop on the Bing It On page to participate in a Pepsi Challenge-like competition. First, the user enters a search topic either from a list of pre-defined words or from their own ideas. After entering the search, Bing It On reveals two side-by-side search results with the name of the search engine omitted.
The user is then prompted to choose which side they prefer, or declare the round as a draw. After five rounds of duking it out, the webpage reveals which engine was chosen for each round and the ultimate winner of the five.
If Google happens to come out on top, Microsoft states, "Google may have won this round, but others picked Bing web search results over Google nearly 2 to 1 in blind comparison tests." Prior to the launch of the challenge, Microsoft contacted an independent research company to produce a similar challenge test of statistical significance.
Although the exact details of the study haven't been revealed, Microsoft claims the results were nearly 2:1 in favor of Bing. While the Bing It On challenge may be a great way for Bing to establish itself as the superior search engine, it can also have quite the opposite effect. Some of us here ran the challenge several times with Google coming out on top each time.
And according to the wall posts on the Bing Facebook page, we aren't the only ones. Now it's just a matter of time before we see who the internet declares as the champion, assuming Bing publishes the total results of the challenge. Head on over to Bingiton.com to participate in the challenge and let us know your results in the comments below!
