Re:Challenging the Bing It On Challenge
by mattwallaert on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @07:00PM
(#6479637)
That's a remarkably clear-headed analysis; thanks for that. We at Bing don't always get the courtesy of people actually thinking deeply about what we do. =]
(Note: I work for Bing.)
Equally, using Mechanical Turk is probably a biased sample (although to their credit, the paper does examine the demographics in detail); mechanical turk workers are paid more the faster they can find results, i.e. they are top-result driven, whereas I would guess leisure queries are more focused on entertainment and finding something interesting in the first few results.
And (despite the fact that I went 100% Google), I figured I should probably be using something more tech-focused, based on my queries, like DuckDuckGo. From that point of view, I think this BingItOn challenge delivers on the goal of getting people to re-examine their preconceived notions of which search engine they should be using.