David Gumpper

After a few weeks with Bing.com being live, I’ve started to find myself gravitating more of my searches towards Bing. I found my own behavior interesting and began to wonder who else is having the same experience or are most people still doing the “Google It” search.

What I found is Google’s Brand is holding strong against the search consumer desire’s to have a visual and different user experience within their search world. This is evident in Eric Schonfeld’s, Tech Crunch article titled “Study Suggests People Prefer Bing’s Design To Google’s, But Still Won’t Switch“.

What is evident, is how a strong brand can withstand the initial entry of a new and serious competitor. The question I’m asking is, “How long can a strong brand retain it’s position of dominance without implementing major changes around the brand?” Especially when the competition has taken an earnest and valid attempt to provide consumers with a different approach to the user experience.

The article from Schonfield shows an interesting eye-tracking heat map study of twelve subjects using Google and Bing. A result from these maps displays how users focus more on the organic search results in Bing, whereas they trend towards the top advertising bar in Google. On both pages, the eye then travels down the page for the most part except, for the left column on Bing does gain some attention by the user. Yes, the study is made up of a very, very small sample size, but I’ve noticed my behavior has tracked the same way on Bing. The question is “Why?”

What will happen is change. Google is not able to sit still for long as others learn and refine their search development as it evolves into the future.

Back to the focus of this article. Let’s survey what you think of Google and Bing. I’ve created the following poll for anyone to participate in and view the results.

If you haven’t used Bing in a true evaluation, here is your chance. Refrain from searching on Google for a week. Yes, as best as you can possible withhold yourself from using Google. Bing It and be cognizant of the search results, where your eye flows on the page, and what you eventually click on. After the week come back to this post and partake in the below poll, and be honest about your choices.

What Are Your Thoughts? Are You Going to “Google It” or “Bing It”?

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Update: TechCrunch releases on 7/1/2009 that Bing.com now carries tweets from Twitter in their search results. Apparently they are not displaying everyone tweets. Only the most important. TechCrunch comments on what the Bing.com people have to say of their new addition,

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start… follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

Saturday, when my son said his Facebook was crawling about Billy Mays, my finger on the keyboard started towards the letter ‘G’, but at the last minute went to ‘T’. It is surprising how behavior can change in a split second. So, it is only natural the other search players want to keep their piece of pie.