What the hell is a decision engine anyway?

I don’t know about you, but those Bing adverts on TV infuriate me. Every time I see them I wonder how much money was put into coming up with something that doesn’t make any sense – at both a product and a brand level.

It’s obviously a thinly veiled attack on Google. The premise is that Google gives you too many irrelevant results in cluttered SERPs – ‘tired of information overload?’

Except it doesn’t. Google may annoy people in many ways, but serving irrelevant results and overloading people with information probably isn’t one of them.

In fact, I am led to believe this was one of the main reasons why Google has achieved its huge success – an uncluttered style. OK, you could argue that it has lost its way, with results that have become cluttered with annoying snippets, such as news. This could be true, but the problem is that Bing offers exactly the same features!

The fundamental problem with this ad campaign (and the entire Bing venture!) is that there is no significant difference between Bing and Google. Nothing that the ordinary user would notice – even in the way they look. ‘Bing’ and ‘Google’ probably even sound like similarly strange words to the average person!

The lack of product difference means that even if the advert achieves its goal of making people try Bing, they will see it isn’t any better compared to Google and switch back. The result will be a lack of trust, which will be very difficult to regain.

A lack of a viable alternative search engine is probably far more of an annoyance to people than the false premise of over-loaded results pages. There is always a swell of opinion against perceived monopolies. Simply reminding people there’s an alternative could be a subtle but effective campaign (as long as they successfully differentiate themselves from their parent monopoly…!)

But no. Bing seem to have spent a lot of time and money getting it very wrong. The false nature of these adverts may even make some of those who were originally wavering rally behind Google.

And it has to be said, even if they had got the product right, the campaign strapline would still be poor:

‘The decision engine’.

The message this delivers to me is that Bing is a solution to a narrow cross-section of search queries.

People don’t necessarily use search engines to make decisions. They simply use them to find something – and a user finding what they were looking for is the successful outcome of the majority of searches.

Bing should broaden the scope. Choosing something like ‘the find engine’ as the strapline would make a less confusing statement about the increased quality of their results and algorithm.

Not that it matters though, as the increased quality isn’t there!

Tags: Bing, Google

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Bing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.