Hakia Challenge
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a re-hash of Bing’s Bing It On challenge where they show side-by-side results with Google and give you one search box. They then ask you to vote on which is best.
Seems similar. Yes, back when I was at Hakia we tried a similar “Challenge” in 2007 as shown in this blog post from Profy. It appears that the Challenge page is down now.
The biggest differences in Bing’s campaign vs Hakia’s is not the search technology; in fact, the inclusion of Powerset’s semantic search technology from their acquisition in 2008 probably makes the technologies very similar. The big difference is ca$h money. Hakia never would have had the budget to promote this type of program.
The other interesting thing I saw in researching this is that there really is no best search results when you get to this level. Results are too subjective and how the user interprets them is really determined by how they search (vague vs detail) and whether they have sense of what they are searching for.
Recently in trying to set-up a WordPress test blog on my lap-top, I found myself using Google frequently for getting help with each next step. What I learned was to start extremely detailed by constructing queries that included all the key differentiators. For instance, this would be my starting point: “upload wordpress photo xampp OSX” (Google | Bing) Grade the results: Maybe even, but it is tough to answer until I read each page to see if it answers my next step.
However, if you keep is simple, like “Red Sox” (Google | Bing) then it comes down to why you searched: news, score, general website, etc. They seem about the same.