The results of a focus group conducted by New York based design firm Catalyst Group are in and Bing continues to slowly but surely make progress in the search landscape. The study showed that many users preferred Bing over Google, but not many were willing to switch from Google to Bing because of the preference and familiarity of Google.

The focus group consisted of 12 people in New York that use Google as their main search engine. No one in the group had used Bing before. Users conducted a “hotel search” and a “shopping search for digital cameras” on both sites. Users completed the searches on one site and then completed the searches on the other site. The task order was rotated to mitigate biased effects. Eye tracking data was also collected and users were interviewed about their experience and a short written survey was filled out.

Catalyst Group was able to come up with three main takeaways as it related to the study.

1. The visual design of Bing was preferred by users over the Google design. Users felt the organization and refinement options were slightly better.
2. Users in the study felt that Bing and Google provided equally relevant results.
3. For the camera search, Bing attracted 150% more viewing time to the ad space at the top of the search result.

In the end, a more appealing design isn’t going to cut it in the battle of the search engines, at least as it relates to overtaking Google. If Bing does manage to retain the users it has experienced since the spike in traffic, it could very well take Yahoo’s spot as the number two engine. Google currently offers too much in terms of an online experience.  It’s not just about having the most relevant searches for Google anymore.  Google now offers a variety of products, including Google Maps, Google Latitude, Webmaster Central, Gmail, iGoogle and much more. Bing is going to have to start offering applications that can rival what Google has done, but first, they need to perfect the search aspect before trying to take down Google in any other category.