Bing Wants You To ‘Bing It On’. Except, Uh, Probably Not.

We’d encourage you to try Bing It On quickly before Microsoft yanks it, because it might be the most unintentionally funny marketing gimmick attempted in years.

Yes, Bing is running a campaign called “Bing It On,” wherein the two search engines are put head-to-head, anonymously, and you choose what results you’d like better. One problem: when I tried it, Google took four out of five matchups. CNet tried it: Google took two out of three and four out of five. The Next Web tried it and Google took all five. Betanews? Google wins. GigaOm didn’t try it, but their commenters did and Google won every time.

You might be detecting a theme here.

Here’s the problem, and it’s something I realized when I took the challenge again and tried to set it up so Bing would win. Take a look at these results, side by side:

There’s one that’s objectively better, here. One that’s more informative. And with the formatting, I realized, it’s easy to tell which is Google and which is Bing. That’s… not really a good thing to emphasize.

It’s instructive for Bing, we suppose, but we can’t imagine that Microsoft is particularly enthused about this. But, hey, at least they got us to use Bing!