Bingiton doesn't play fair

I've been seeing a lot of the same Bingiton ad on TV and online, so I thought I'd take some time out to explain some of the cheating they're doing.  In their currently running ad, they searched for "Napa Valley", so let's take a closer look, shall we?  (For the record, I used private browsing tabs in Firefox for my look at Bingiton.  I strongly urge you to try to replicate my results.)

You're not seeing everything
First, Microsoft's Bingiton purposely blocks the right sidebar.  If it had been included, you might not be quite as convinced that Bing was better at returning good results for popular search terms.  In fact, the right sidebar information from Google is completely missing from Bing's results!

They doctored the results
Second, if you zoom in closely to the ad's search results, they've purposely altered the names and added "screens simulated".  In other words, they were doctored.  I don't know why they'd do that -- I'm sure someone else has an answer -- but they salted the results (see second to top image) with website names that are registered by Microsoft and point back to them.  Wait till you see the part below on really bad cheating.

It's called hypocrisy
Third, the organization -- icomp.org -- that Microsoft set up to lobby against Google, specifically complained in a white paper (link is a pdf download) that, "Google uses Universal Search to drive significant traffic to its own online mapping services".  And yet, that's exactly what Bing is doing!  If you look closely at the Bing results for "Napa Valley", they've obscured the fact that the second from the top result returned is from Bing Travel.  And what is that in the Bing Travel listing? A map that links directly to Microsoft's own map service!  (Oh, and if you do enough searches, you'll find that Microsoft points back to its own MSN services in the top-2 results, too.)

Obscure searches lead to inaccurate results
Fourth, I've previously noted this when Microsoft aired their Scroogle ads, but if you're searching for obscure items, Google returns far better results.  And if you peruse beyond the first few hundred search results, you'll also notice that Bing begins to return irrelevant results much faster.

Really bad cheating
Fifth, try this (you'll get a kick out of this one): type into Bingiton's search box, "slow lorii".  Yes, I know that it's a misspelling, and it's on purpose.  Open two separate tabs, one for each search engine, and type in that same term, "slow lorii".  Notice how remarkably different (and odd at the top) the results are, from the Bingiton and the actual search engine results are?  Yes, Microsoft really screwed up the Bingiton sanitization,

And going back to my first point, you will notice that Google returns the sidebar information for "slow loris", while Microsoft just dropped the ball.  If Bingiton hadn't sanitized the sidebar, it would have failed.

Now, go back to Bingiton's search box and type in, "slow loris", then do the same search in those separate Google and Bing search tabs.  Bing's results change!

If you keep doing odd searches and misspelled ones, you begin to notice that sometimes Bingiton will remove content from search results, and sometimes it doesn't.  If you were to spend enough time, I bet there's a discernible pattern.

Bottom line
Bingiton doctored the game, but you might not have known it, if you simply used Bingiton to compare the two search engines, thinking that Microsoft is playing fair.  (Isn't that grounds for false advertising?)

And for the record, even though they altered the results from the last time I wrote about Bingiton, I can still  score perfect Google results, all without double-checking on a separate search tab.