Which is Better? Bing or Google?

A study was conducted by NY design firm Catalyst Group to compare the working of Google and Bing. The study was conducted on a focus group consisting of 12 people. The results showed that people appreciated Bing in many ways but since Google is what they are accustomed to, they prefer using it. The search result can be interpreted in two ways. First way is that Bing has to work a lot to get past the Google addiction of people. And the second one is that Google has got a very serious competitor.

The focus group that was studied had consisted of 12 people in New York who had been using Google as their default search engine and had never used Bing before. These people were asked to conduct a “hotel search” and a “shopping search for digital cameras”. The search was conducted on both sites. Users conducted search on one site and then went to the next one. The order of using the search engine was reversed to avoid bias effects. Interviews about the experience as well as eye tracking data were collected.

The results were the following:

1. Most users thought that the visual design of Bing was better and that it was slightly better when it comes to organization and filtering options.
2. The users thought that despite Bing being better in some ways, both search engines produced equally good search results. Finally majority of the users concluded they would continue using Google over Bing and were not likely to switch.
3. For the camera search, Bing attracted 150% more user viewing time on account of the ad space at the top of the search results.

When the results are compared Google wins 8 as opposite to 4 for Bing on account of the following features:

1. Familiarity in usage
2. Benefits of Google applications
3. Enhancement in Bing not sufficient enough to switch

But overall the users like the features and interface features with Bing.

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