Study: Bing More “Biased” Than Google; Google Not Behaving Anti-Competitively

[Lite Beer]

Study: Bing More “Biased” Than Google; Google Not Behaving Anti-Competitively

Does Google favor its own sites in search results, as many critics have claimed? Not necessarily. New research suggests claims that Google is “biased” are overblown, and that Google’s primary competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, may actually be serving Microsoft-related results “far more” often than Google links to its own services in search results.

In an analysis of a large, random sample of search queries, the study from Josh Wright, Professor of Law and Economics at George Mason University, found that Bing generally favors Microsoft content more frequently, and far more prominently, than Google favors its own content. According to the findings, Google references its own content in its first results position in just 6.7% of queries, while Bing provides search result links to Microsoft content more than twice as often (14.3%).

The results from the new study by Wright, sponsored by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) are important, especially given the challenges Google has recently faced from an FTC Inquiry over its business practices, antitrust complaints and Senate hearings looking into its alleged anti-competitive behavior.

Continued: http://searchengineland.com/study-bing-more-biased-than-google-google-not-behaving-anti-competitively-99774

[daninthai]

Does this take into account the relative numbers of sites run by google and microsoft? Maybe microsoft runs twice as many sites as google, so gets twice as many sites showing in search results.

Anyway, I would trust google more than microsoft any day.

[nikster]

Strange that they'd hurt their own credibility before they've even built up a substantial user base... but not entirely unexpected. It's Microsoft, after all.

That Google doesn't favor its own content - no surprise there, the company operates like that.

Oh yeah another thing that's standard procedure at Microsoft is to order studies that make Microsoft look good - so I am willing to bet they've already given somebody money to create a study that shows the opposite. Just like every year or so they get some security experts to proclaim Windows the most secure OS - all evidence to the contrary.

[jsat]

[try again the attachment never attached]

Edited November 6, 2011 by jsat

[jsat]

any system that tell you this is just 'brain dead" Bing Maps in this case ... Read the error message and if that is not self promotion what is?

[nikster]

any system that tell you this is just 'brain dead" Bing Maps in this case ... Read the error message and if that is not self promotion what is?

The tiger doesn't change its stripes, I suppose.

That error message is vintage Microsoft. A normal company would implement whatever wizardry they're doing in standard HTML5, then it would work everywhere, and if it didn't work, users just needed to update their browsers. Either MS used something non-standard here - but I don't think they did - or they put up an intentionally misleading error message.

Oh yeah a friend of mine who has been a Mac user and advocate for nearly 20 years tried switching to Bing search once. That was during the time when Google did a lot of bad things. He didn't even last a month - search results very poor compared with Google.