Obviously there is a lot of discussion about Bing and is it any better than Google etc etc. Fair enough. But some of the articles I’ve read leap to conclusions that really don’t hold much water.
In one article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/10/bing_google_eyeballs/) we are led to believe that Bing is in fact better than Google for advertisers.
This is based on ‘research’ carried out by User Centric. They tracked the eyeball movement of users as they browsed both Google and Bing search results and found that although there was very little difference between them in terms of natural results, Bing attracted far more eyeball time when it came to the sponsored links.
User Centric’s results showed that Bing’s sponsored results on the right of the page attracted more eyeballs than Googles. 42% of the participants looked at Bings wheras 28% looked at Googles. Those that did look at them - spent pretty much the same amount of time looking at them.
All the research is carried out in User Centric’s labs using infra red technology to track eye movement across the page. So I trust the findings and it’s really interesting stuff - so I thought I’d do a bit more digging and see if I could find out some more.
So I went to the User Centric site and read their original article on the experiment where I discovered that the reasearch was carried out on just 21 people! http://www.usercentric.com/news/2009/06/08/eye-tracking-bing-vs-google-first-look
That strikes me as a very low sample of what is an enormous universe of internet surfers.
And lets face it - everyone is pretty much familiar with Google and considerably less familiar with Bing - so where do you think people are going to spend the most time looking around? At something they know already or at something they may never have seen before.
It may well turn out that Bing is indeed better for advertisers and that’s cool - but I don’t think we can be sure of that. Just yet.
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One Comment
Good to see that some of the claims re Bing are being subject to scrutiny and detailed examination. The number of users here is ridiculously small as is the length of time Big has been live. Yet there are daily posts, tweets, etc announcing Bing’s share growth. It’s far too early to tell what will happen and given the huge ad budget reportedly behind the launch, you would expect Microsoft to see some gains. The big question is whether consumers remain on Bing and if it can take a significant chunk of Google’s share.