In this extremely superficial and misleading commercial for
the Microsoft search engine Bing, some guy purports to convince people on the
street that they like Bing better than Google in what is basically a retread of
the Pepsi Challenge ads from the 1980s. So this guy tells people they will like
Bing better, they tell him to prove it, and then he shows them Bing vs. Google
side-by-side for the same search, and then the people say they like the Bing
results better. But the results we see are not really an honest representation
of Bing vs. Google searches, because we’re only seeing what the page looks
like, rather than focusing on the actual search results, and as a result of
this approach, the people appear to be either completely dishonest, or
else perhaps they’re ridiculously superficial. Because what’s happening
here is that the Bing search results have a bunch of pictures at the top of the
page, and the Google search results don’t. So I guess the people like pretty little
pictures and not actual search results (in the surfing example, there’s only
like one website listed, and the rest is pictures: ridiculous!). But you can
search images on Google if that’s what you want, so is this really an honest
comparison? I thought searching for something on a search engine meant you were
looking for the website results you wanted, but apparently Bing wants to
distract us with pictures, and use up a large chunk of the page with such
stuff, rather than actual search results. How is that better? Maybe if you’re
shallow or easy to distract with shiny objects Bing is better for this page
layout, but it doesn’t look better to me, because a search engine is only for
searching results in my opinion, and that means the one that provides the greater
number of accurate search results is preferable to me. And in actual general
use, I think most everyone would prefer that.
Let’s check the taco search just as an example (I will give
you a link to a large-screen version of this ad so you can compare them.): in
this case, the woman queried claims she likes the left side better, which is
Bing. Well, on this left side which is the Bing search results, there are some
pictures of tacos at the top of the page, without any indication of what they
are or where they’re from. Unless you’re looking for stock images of tacos, how
is this helpful other than as eye candy with no substance that just takes up
space for no reason? (If you want images, wouldn’t you search under different
parameters, like an image search? Putting both images and web page results in
the same window seems to crowd out the website matches to a bit of an annoying
extent. I guess you could turn that function off, but can’t you also turn this
kind of thing on in a Google search? It just seems like a superficial
comparison intended to mislead to viewer.) And looking at the Google side, they
have a list of taco restaurants with ratings from consumers and with addresses
and phone numbers and links to the restaurants’ web pages; this seems a lot more
useful to me than a bunch of pictures of random tacos and four website results.
The search, I’m assuming, is supposed to be related to wanting to go eat tacos
(The Bing guy in the ad says: “Let’s look at some taco places”, and only Google
actually has a list of taco places in their results; Bing’s results list three websites with general information about tacos and only one taco place), and if that’s the case, then this TV commercial for Bing
clearly demonstrates, without a shadow of a doubt, that Google is a way better
option for this search. You can see the names, ratings, contact info, a maps
option, website links to each one, etc., all on the same search page, so you
don’t even have to click on anything if you don’t want to, and you can select
from this one page and just go: how can you have a better, easier, or more useful search result than
that? But it doesn’t look as flashy as the Bing results page, and this is a
quick TV ad scenario, so I guess it’s easy for them to think they can pull the
wool over our eyes in a quick TV spot by having pretty colorful pictures
splashed across the top, rather than useful information.
Here’s Bing’s “Bing It On” Hollywood spot:
(And no, I don’t work for Google. In fact I’m getting more and more annoyed at how their search results seem more and more to be determined by who pays the most money to appear at the top of the results list. But generally speaking, if you want a simple and useful search result, and you know how to do an advanced search, Google is pretty darn good, which is why so many other search engines went bye-bye since Google arrived: Google is just better and more useful. {I just hope their constant quest for more and more revenue doesn’t continue to deteriorate the quality or usefulness of their flagship product: their search engine. But it’s probably inevitable that it will.})
