Bing And Google Get Testy

It's round 50-something in the war between Google (GOOG) and Bing, Microsoft's new/rebranded search engine. And all around the Web, the critics are still offering their consumer reviews, trying to figure out which doohickey is the niftiest. Other folks are cooking up supposedly objective tests to ascertain the utility of each site.

Exhibit A: "Blind Search." Over the weekend, a gentleman named Michael Kordahi set up a Web site in which users type in a search query and get three results: one from Bing, one from Google, and one from Yahoo (YHOO). Users then vote on which results were the most useful or accurate, without knowing which company offered them up. But as Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson noticed, the test quickly got a little, well, testy.

With 793 tests, Bing took an early lead, beating Google 38 percent to 36 percent. Then Matt Cutts, a Google employee, pointed out on FriendFeed that Kordahi works for Microsoft. "I worry a little bit about self-selection bias," he wrote. As the tests came pouring in, Google retook the lead, but Yahoo came roaring down the track and jumped ahead with 45 percent of the vote. That, everyone began to think, was a little too pat. "Yahoo is rising suspiciously fast," declared Google Blogoscoped writer Philipp Lensen. "Perhaps the poll is being hacked." Indeed, Kordahi eventually yanked all the poll results altogether, complaining about "some douche gaming the system." Hmmm. There's gotta be a better way to build buzz than this, Carol Bartz.

Meanwhile, the consumer-research firm User Centric conducted its own test of Bing and Google. Outfitting 21 test subjects with technology that tracked their eye movements, User Centric had the subjects conduct four searches apiece with Google and Bing, recording where they looked on the screen. The result? Users looked at Bing's ads considerably more often than Google's, attracting Bing users 42 percent of the time to Google's 25 percent.

Tameka Kee of paidContent.org points out that this is an awfully small sample size, but she's at least a little impressed. "The eye-tracking data and design theories can't make up for the fact that Bing's results currently aren't as comprehensive as Google's," she writes. "If Microsoft can fix that—meaning indexing sites faster and increasing relevance—while maintaining the high level of user attention on the paid search ads, then Bing's new interface could actually wind up being a game-changer."

Finally, here's some data that won't make either Microsoft or Google happy. Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson stumbled upon a study that found half of all search advertisers walk away after just one buy. In other words, they try advertising on Google or Bing, don't like the results, and quit. "If it's true that ... local businesses are simply uninterested in search advertising because it doesn't generate enough return on investment, the growth prospects for search engines companies like Google must be considered greatly diminished," Carlson writes. But somehow we think Google will survive.