Bing v/s Google eye tracking study reveals big differences between the two

Ever since the launch of Bing, the search world is in two sides.

1- The bing lovers and the
2– “I’ll take my time to believe” types

I think I’m the second type. Bing’s traffic looked promising. After all, all that money pumped into promotion gave results. But apart from that Bing was/is an interesting tool in itself. The direction was quite unique of that of a “decision engine”. I wouldn’t have given it a try, if they branded as “the better search engine”. Even before trying I’d presume it to be a failure, because I knew Live and MSN. So …you know !

But no, looks like Bing is really turning heads. A recent report at mashable shows that Bing is really badass, it crossed cnn.com, twitter and even digg.com in numbers.

What’s interesting is that Live is now dead, its moved to Bing. So all the traffic that Live had is not on BIng. And the additional numbers I’d assume are the testers. If the traffic sustains, then I’d agree that Bing is making an impact, but if it declines, it just goes out to show that the “testers” aren’t satisfied.

Now, here’s an interesting Eyetracker study done on a  couple of people comparing Google and Bing.

In this study, Eye tracking technology was used to capture 21 participants’ eye movements as they completed two informational (e.g., "Learn about eating healthy") and two transactional (e.g., "Book a last minute vacation") search tasks in each engine. 21 people are not that much, but it definitely shows interesting patterns.

Check out the heatmaps comparing the two.

And here are the results.

Distribution of attention on Google vs. Bing:

• Google and Bing did not differ in terms of the amount of attention on the organic search results.
  In each search, all participants looked at the organic search results, spending an average of 7 seconds in that area.
• Attention on the sponsored links located above the organic results was similarly high for both Bing and Google.
  Over 90% of participants looked in that area during each search. As expected, during transactional searches, participants would spend more time looking at the sponsored results on top (~2.5 seconds) than they did on informational searches (~1.5 seconds).
• However, sponsored links on the right attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search).
  The participants who fixated on these links spent approximately 2.5 seconds looking at the area during transactional searches and 2 seconds during informational searches. These times were similar for the two search engines.
• Another difference between Bing and Google involved related searches.
  On Bing, related searches are shown on the left, right below the categories, while on Google, related searches are below the organic search results, towards the bottom of the page. Bing’s related searches had a much higher visibility than Google’s, attracting the attention of 31% of participants per search. Google’s related searches attracted the attention of only 5% of participants per search.
  Read the full story here.

These indeed are great results. Although its obvious that Bing has a slightly different layout compared to Google, users tend to look for organic search results more than anything else on the page. And in Google they are more accessible than on Bing.

Its only a matter of time to get an answer on whether Bing is really shifting people from using Google or not. At the moment, it sure is turning some heads, in fact, lots of them.

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