世論 What Japan Thinks

The headline figure is not really surprising to me, partially because it has taken so long to get a survey out on the new search engine Bing from Microsoft, this one being conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 22nd of June 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. There was no split by the the sexes listed for some reason, but 12.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 36.0% in their thirties, 37.3% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 4.7% in their sixties.

I’ve tried Bing a few times, but I suppose I’m just too much of a Google fan to look objectively at it.

As for the name, the first thing I think of is a bing, a mountain of slag from a coal mine. The second is Bing Hitler, who now seems to be doing rather nice for himself as a host on a US late-night chat show.

Research results

Q1: Do you know that Microsoft have announced a new search engine named Bing? (Sample size=300)

Yes (to SQ1)	11.0%
No	89.0%

Q1SQ1: Have you tried out Bing? (Sample size=33)

Yes (to SQ2)	42.4%
No	57.6%

Q1SQ2: Do you think Bing is useful? (Sample size=14)

Yes	42.9%
No	0.0%
Can’t say either way	57.1%

Putting the three together we get:

Q1+SQs: Do you think Bing is useful? (Sample size=300)

Yes	2.0%
No	0.0%
Can’t say either way	2.7%
Not used it	6.3%
Never heard of it	89.0%