Bing vs Google: The Bing It On Challenge

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!

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Tuan Mai
Tuan Mai is a Los Angeles based writer and marketing manager working within the PC Hardware industry. He has written for Tom's Guide since 2010, with a special interest in the weird and quirky.
  • samkl
    Good call for Microsoft to try to shake up Bing. I just dont know anyone who willingly uses Bing or anything that Bing does better than Google. What the answer to this question "why anyone would willingly switch from Google to Bing"?
    Some true differentiator examples are:
    - Duckduckgo.com search does not "bubble" you and does it trace your past searches. there are people who like it and use
    - Qaudlook search puts classic and realtime social media together. there are people who like to save time.
    - Twitter.com finds realtime answers

    Where is search going from Google? Could there be anything beyond?
    Reply
  • iceman1992
    My result : 4 Google, 0 Bing, 1 Draw.. LOL the strategy backfired in my case
    Reply
  • captainblacko
    I like bing but i never use it mainly because firefox defaults the search tool bar to google and im too lazy to change it!

    anyway the best thing for me about Bing is the maps. I love the birds eye view feature.
    Reply
  • jaquith
    Google is still 'it' until there's something better...still waiting!
    Hmm...Coke vs Pepsi, well Bing is salt water.

    /Edit - for those ____ folks with the (-1) ; 0 Bing vs 5 Google! '2 to 1' must not know how to search.

    See for yourself => http://i1013.photobucket.com/albums/af254/Jaquith/Bing-v-Google.jpg

    Again, ...Coke vs Pepsi, well Bing is salt water.
    Reply
  • Tried that, Google 4 - Bing 1
    Reply
  • znakist
    BING WON 0 ROUNDS * loool why im not surprised. They suck big time on the search. nothing compare to google right now.
    Reply
  • Bing 0 - Draw 1 - Google 4
    Bing brought up a lot of sites selling what I was looking for rather than sites with information about what I was looking for. For example if I search for an IBM M1015 Bing brought up nothing but generic faceless wholesaler websites while Google brought up threads from ard|Forum, VMware forums and many more info pages. Bing is just marketing crap, though not saying Google isn't, at least Google doesn't make it as apparant.
    Reply
  • The_Trutherizer
    I like Bing's add free result., but I cannot say I have a preference for actual web results between the two. For me Google's image and video results are far superior to Bing's . And these are features I often use. In general Google's extra search features are better. Microsoft's implementations seem thin at best or poor imitations in the worst cases. No map search - Google rules freely accessible maps plain and simple. And finally when moving down the list of broad seach options in both browsers you basically start seeing the cracks in Bing when you press the "more" option in the both browsers. Bing is weak.
    Reply
  • hunshiki
    @Samkl: I tried switching to Duckduckgo, due to their "Google is evil" marketing. It's true to some extent, as in it really tracks your search and will provide personalized ads.

    But again. When I'm logged in, or I just use Google.com, I get good results. Results I can use, I want.
    If I use Duckduckgo (either from the website or from Firefox's search bar), I just get irrelevant links.

    (And there is Ghostery, if anyone dislikes the tracking features. For example, this page contains 18 scripts, according to Ghostery.)
    Reply
  • vertigo_2000
    Google 3, Bing 2 - It was close for me. in all honesty, they both brought up basically the same websites... Google just seemed to put them in more relevant order.
    Reply