Oh Microsoft. We see what you did there. Everyone sees what you did there. You’re trying so hard, and you know what they say about trying too hard…

You tried to make Bing a verb, just like Google, and you paid for an awful lot of product placement for your phones and surface tablets in big budget American TV shows. And all it did was make us wince.

And then you built this: Bing It On, to show us all how Google and Bing search engine results pages differ. You did this to try and make us all use Bing. But do you know what it’s made me do instead? It’s made me go, “huh, all that optimisation I do for Google to make sure the right content displays in the SERP pages doesn’t work on Bing. Wow, Bing sucks.”

And somehow I really don’t think that was your plan. 

That’s not to say that BingItOn (name aside) is not a very useful site. It is. I’m taking screendumps of it right now so I have a benchmark for the brand new search project I now have to do to optimise my sites for Bing. (Thanks for that, like I didn’t already have enough to do).

But this is not going to make me use Bing. It’s going to make me consider it more when looking at SEO campaigns but it’s not going to make me use it.

And honestly, before I saw BingItOn that was because I heard your search engine was not as good, and now, after seeing BingItOn, it’s mostly because I don’t understand why the specified meta data for my pages is not influencing the results as it should. Which again, makes me thing your search engine is not as good as Google.

And the fact that you say you’ve got 2 years of results that people chose Bing over Google? Well just a tiny bit of Googling (sorry) revealed this article from Moz that details a number of issues with this so-called blind comparison. And the fact this article didn’t come up when I searched for the same keyword in Bing really does seem suspect.

Oh Bing, t’s not that you’re not pretty, you are. But as your search algorithm and SERPs seem to be ignoring things like meta description and page title, it does make me worry about the basic building blocks of your site.

So yes, BingItOn will now make me do some research, find out what is different and go out of my way to ensure my sites are presented as well in Bing as they are in Google. But it’s not going to make me use Bing as my primary search engine.

At least, not until Google releases those drones they bought and moves one step closer to their apparent eventual goal of being SkyNet (ever since they dropped Don’t Be Evil it’s been an ever-present worry of mine).

Then I might use Bing. Maybe.