I just spotted the new Bing advert on TV. While it’s well executed and gets the message across, I’m not sure the search engine is delivering on its promise just yet.
The spot I saw begins with a woman asking a stranger “which tube is it for Euston station?“. The man starts to ramble random information, presumably the kind of results that you’d encounter on most search engines. It closes with:
“What has information overload done to us? Next time you search online, try Bing.com – the decision engine, from Microsoft”.
A visual follows with the text “london underground” being typed into Bing. However, it never shows you the result.
I think the advert in itself is quite fun, and relates well to the feeling of information overload, but a quick test of the scenario in practise reveals that there’s yet some tweaking required to earn those bragging rights.
My first search after seeing the advert was for “which tube for euston station?”, as this is the actual phrase in the advert, and a well-targeted search query. The resulting one-box contains the local listings for shops etc, which didn’t help me with my query. The second result was however Wikipedia which gave me the answer.
When typing in the more generic query “london underground”, it did a much better job with site links for the Transport for London website (including maps), from where I could find the answer to my original problem. While this was better than the Google results, which was lacking site links, it still required some further navigation on the TFL website.
While the specific search didn’t give me a fully satisfactory result on Bing.com, I’m so overall well-impressed by the search engine, and am positive that it will be able to eat into Google’s market share.
Bing.com UK search results for "which tube for euston station?"
Bing.com UK result for "london underground"
Google.co.uk result for "london under ground"
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I agree with your last statement. Google seems to be getting into the news for the wrong reasons too often. e.g. the protest in Germany against the proposed street view, potential EU rulings etc..certainly bodes well for Bing and Yahoo. On the plus side, Google’s analytics and tools are superb compared to others.