Is Google an eternal search engine king? People like Bing only when they do not know it’s Bing!

Which search engine do you use? Majority of the people out there will have only one answer “Google”. If you again ask them “Why Google? Why not Bing?” They simply reply “Google’s better”. You might even hear people ask “What’s Bing?” Everyone uses Google and only a very few use it because they THINK Google’s better. For others, “search engine” means “Google”.

I read a recent study done by Microsoft, published on Thom Carver’s post in search engine watch. According to the study, people liked Bing search results over the ones presented by Google. Statistics indicate that 57% liked Bing and 30% liked Google. Now, Bing wins over Google in this study, but you and I know the fact that, in real life Google still dominates over Bing. The reason why the study showed positive stats for Bing is because, people who said Bing was better didn’t actually know that they were seeing the search results presented by Bing.

Microsoft has setup this “blind taste” challenge where people were allowed to search for key terms for which the results were displayed in a side by side screen. The results page will have no branding and people cannot know which results they are seeing. Microsoft offered xboxs if the people chose Google. People took the challenge and they preferred Bing search results in a ratio of 2:1. See the video where people lose their belongings as they choose Bing

When the branding was removed from the search engines and only the results were shown, people who said Google is the best search engine initially actually chose Bing search results as the winner. This means that Google is embarked on an unconquerable territory called ultimate branding. For the people Google is the only best search engine and they don’t want to try any others. No matter what the other search engines claim to be good at, people don’t even bother to check them out. While this is a wise move by Bing to make people try a change, I seriously doubt that the people who chose Bing results over Google by being blindfolded about what page they were in would actually try Bing for a change in their real life usage