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Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

freakonomics.com

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Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#2
It's great that they did this study. I wish more people would publicly challenge many of the outlandish claims in advertising. But it seems rather hypocritical to knock Microsoft for a sample size of "nearly 1,000" when their own study "obtained 1,008 Bing It On challenge responses from the MTurk platform and narrowed our analysis to 985 respondents who submitted screen shots for 4925 searches."

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#3
post #2

It's great that they did this study. I wish more people would publicly challenge many of the outlandish claims in advertising. But it seems rather hypocritical to knock Microsoft for a sample size of "nearly 1,000" when their own study "obtained 1,008 Bing It On challenge responses from the MTurk platform and narrowed our analysis to 985 respondents who submitted screen shots for 4925 searches."

Not in this case, no. They were trying to replicate Microsoft's results, which entails using a similar sample size.

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#4
Microsoft lying in an advert? Impossible! They've never had to resort to that before!

http://www.curi.us/1571-lying-microsoft-advertising

http://blog.debate.org/2010/12/06/the-cloud-is-a-lie-how-mic...

http://techrights.org/2010/01/09/guardian-microsoft-podcast/

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/23/microsoft-caught-l...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di-zq2JD-3A

http://modmyi.com/content/10764-microsoft-bashes-apple-samsu...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3984700/microsoft-negative...

Of course, Microsoft has an article about why telling lies in your advertising is bad, but as usual, they fail to heed their own advice.

http://www.microsoft.com/business/en-us/resources/marketing/...

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#5
post #4

Microsoft lying in an advert? Impossible! They've never had to resort to that before! http://www.curi.us/1571-lying-microsoft-advertising http://blog.debate.org/2010/12/06/the-cloud-is-a-lie-how-mic... http://techrights.org/2010/01/09/guardian-microsoft-podcast/ http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/23/microsoft-caught-l... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di-zq2JD-3A http://modmyi.com/content/10764-microsoft-bashes-a…

I ranted about them fairly recently...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6407397

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#6
Its a little interesting, I tried Bing for a bit to avoid Google's onerous privacy issues, and I gave up. I moved to DuckDuckGo, haven't been back. The results are usually more relevant for me and I don't have to feed the Big-G machine.

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#7
Website operators need to revolt against Microsoft and their bots.

We see nearly a thousand parallel connections from their bots, nearly continuously.

For only 18% of search use, they seem to consume several times more resources than Google.

And for some stupid reason their bing bot and msn bot do not share data but crawl the same pages independently.

(and yes we use crawl-delay directive, they ignore it)

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#8
Marketing aside I find Bing results good. Google is kind of turning into singularity and tends to return only google (or US) centered results (for example youtube only videos). Bing seems to have better diversity.

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#9
> When I looked into the claim a bit more, I was slightly annoyed to learn that the “nearly 2:1” claim is based on a study of just 1,000 participants. To be sure, I’ve often published studies with similarly small datasets, but it’s a little cheeky for Microsoft to base what might be a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on what I’m guessing is a low six-figure study.

He's right, but a sample of 1,000 is rigorous compared to most studies used in adverts. Give a product to 50 people and ask if they like it or not. That turns into 97% of people recommend our product!!

Since I live in a country with heavily regulated advertising I'm surprised that there isn't something to cover "sounding sciencey" or "sounding mathy". Certainly if the math is wrong you can get it changed.

Re: Challenging the Bing It On Challenge

#10
I tried the BingItOn.com challenge: 5/5 for Google for me. But I saw that Microsoft was trying to push me towards "popular" queries (what Miley Cyrus said today about the government shutdown). So I think this is an issue of demographics and sampling: for mass-market 'leisure' queries I could easily see Bing beating Google if that's what Bing is focusing on.

Equally, using Mechanical Turk is probably a biased sample (although to their credit, the paper does examine the demographics in detail); mechanical turk workers are paid more the faster they can find results, i.e. they are top-result driven, whereas I would guess leisure queries are more focused on entertainment and finding something interesting in the first few results.

And (despite the fact that I went 100% Google), I figured I should probably be using something more tech-focused, based on my queries, like DuckDuckGo. From that point of view, I think this BingItOn challenge delivers on the goal of getting people to re-examine their preconceived notions of which search engine they should be using.

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