"Bing it On" - Side By Side Search SmackDown

Bing's most aggressive marketing promotion to date, the "BING IT ON" side-by-side search smackdown was launched on September 6th. Based on the old "Pepsi Challenge" where blindfolded soda testers would show which product they liked best, Pepsi or Coke, Bing wants to show the world they are better, or at least as good as Google when it comes to search.

The challenge works by asking you to conduct searches and vote on side-by-side results which are not branded clearly as to which engine it is. Raters choose either a win, or a draw for either result. According to Bing's study, users preferred Bing 2 to 1 over Google in blind comparison tests with a user base of nearly 1000 people.

The independent study by Answers Research based in San Diego, CA used a random survey panel, and were not told that Microsoft was involved with the test. Since showing the Social Sidebar and other unique features like Google's Knowledge Graph would've skewed results, some portions of Bing and Google were left out, leaving only plain organic search results. Users could vote for either engine, or decide the result was a draw with no clear winner.

The results came back with 57.4% for Bing, 30.2% choosing Google and 12.4% resulted in a draw.

According to Bing, this test had a 95% confidence factor. Frankly, in several tests we did, Google did come back the winner quite often but it's quite possible our experience with both engines threw our own testing off.

You should give the test a shot when you have some free time, visit - bingiton.com where you'll be presented with two sets of unbranded results to choose from and 5 rounds of searches to determine your winner.

Bing is running a nationwide TV ad campaign promoting the test which for us search geeks i...