Well, I’ll give Microsoft and Bing this. They’re clearly not going down without a fight. In fact, thanks to their latest marketing ploy, that is exactly what they are seeking.

If you go to the website Bing It On, you can take part in a challenge that pits the search engines Google and Bing against each other in a side by side comparison. You enter a search term, and the results generated by both pages are given to you, along with the option to choose which results were better, or to declare it a draw. At the end of five searches, your score is tallied to reveal which search engine was your overall preference. Of course, to make sure that you have an open mind about the subject, this is a blind test and doesn’t make an indication as to which search engine is which when the results are displayed, Pepsi Challenge style.

Although, my guess is the average internet user is probably aware when they are looking at Google search results.

And that’s what makes this competition so bizarre. Even though the end of the test shows that overall results favor Bing at a 2-1 ratio, after taking the test three times, 15 total searches, my personal results came up with a draw once and Google coming ahead twice. While I freely admit that some of this may have been me subliminally recognizing Google and choosing it, even my Bing preferences were little more than the result of a mental “coin flip” of sorts that resulted from me not wanting to choose the draw option and cop out.

In fact the biggest conclusion I drew from this contest is that Bing is on par with Google. Congrats to them for that, but I don’t think that was ever really the question was it? Proving you’re as good as Google doesn’t make you Google, and if Bing really wants to close the gap in the search engine market share, it should probably spend more time working on what makes it different from the search giant, and not proving that if you type donuts into Bing, you get equal or slightly more appealing results for donuts than Google.

In a bit of irony about this challenge that kind of highlights that predicament, using Bing as one of the search subjects produced better results through Google, and I heard about the challenge initially using…Google.

But hey, it’s a fun little use of five minutes if you can spare it.

Wolfram Alpha recently released an update for its overpriced iPhone app. The update includes some new keyboards, graphics, and tables. The one thing it didn’t improve on was the price. The app still runs $50, back up from the $19.99 it cost during the holidays.

It’s not that the app blows everything else out of the water. An app called BarMax runs a full thousand dollars. But BarMax isn’t available on the web. Wolfram Alpha is. All of it. They removed the iPhone-optimized version of the site some time ago, presumably to encourage sales for the app. You can still get everything out of Wolfram Alpha, though, if you just visit the website on your phone. The only thing you’re missing is screen specific formatting.

If you really need that kind of formatting and have $50 laying around, maybe this is for you. Personally, I’ll keep my Wolfram calculations on my laptop.

Source: TechCrunch