Did you find this blog post through Bing? Probably not — 67% of worldwide searches go through Google, 18% through Bing. But Microsoft has advertised in a substantial TV campaign that — in the cyber analog to blind taste-testing — people prefer Bing “nearly 2:1.” A year ago, when I first saw these ads, the 2-1 claim seemed implausible. I would have thought the search results of these competitors would be largely identical, and that it would be hard for people to distinguish between the two sets of results, much less prefer one kind 2:1. When I looked into the claim a bit more, I was slightly annoyed to learn that the “nearly 2:1” claim is based on a study of just 1,000 participants. To be sure, I’ve often published studies with similarly small data sets, but it’s a little cheeky for Microsoft to base what might be a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on what I’m guessing is a low-six-figure study.