Google Isn't The Only Biased Shopping Search, Bing Is Too.

Don’t get Scroogled says Microsoft in its latest Bing campaign, and its most recent effort to woo users away from Google. The company even put out this (somewhat amusing) video displaying how you could get “Scroogled” this holiday season.

Now I understand where Microsoft is coming from with this new campaign, typically Google has been very clear about what was an advertisement on its site and what wasn’t, with Google Shopping it isn’t as clear. And despite the warning in the footer and the “Why these products?” message, it’s still slightly deceiving.

However, is Bing really as unbiased as it makes itself out to be?

If you do a quick search on Bing for “tablets” or “best selling tablet” it would appear that Bing’s search results are in fact biased, too. In fact, both of those search queries on Bing Shopping bring back the Microsoft Surface powered by Windows RT as the first two results with the 64GB model as the first result and the 32GB model as the second result, subsequently followed by the iPad and other tablets.

Now surely the Microsoft Surface isn’t the best selling tablet, so why is it the first result? That being said, the results on Bing Shopping for “tablet” or “best selling tablet” actually are pretty terrible. You’ll notice that the iPad 2 is listed as the number three search result, shouldn’t it be listing the latest iPad? On top of that, the iPad mini doesn’t even make an appearance in the search results until the third row. The results also list the HP TouchPad for sale in the second row of results, seriously?

And to top it all off, Bing says right above its shopping search results that, “Payment is NOT a factor used to rank search results in Bing.” It might not be, but that doesn’t mean its results are clean either, or even any good.

Yeah, I’m picking on Bing Shopping right now, but I also went over to Google Shopping to try the same set of searches, “best selling tablet” didn’t bring up any mention of the iPad, however, did bring up the a Lenovo IdeaPad, Nook, and Motorola XOOM 2. A search for “tablets” brought up better results, but Google listed the Nexus 7 as the number one most popular tablet and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 as the second most popular, while the iPad 2 was slotted in as the number three most popular tablet. These results aren’t much better.

So maybe, what it really comes down to is, we can’t trust either of the big guys when it comes to shopping search engines.

So what do I recommend you do? Well, while I have only used Decide.com on a limited basis, I’d say you’re probably better off using it as your shopping search engine this holiday season (or well, always) its most likely better than either Google Shopping or Bing Shopping.