Parisian Love: The Google Search Ad

If you haven’t heard yet, Google recently generated a lot of buzz by purchasing a Superbowl ad slot for a cool US$5mil. It features “Parisian Love“, a long-distance love story told through keywords.

Some speculate that it’s feeling intimidated by Microsoft’s rival search engine, Bing. Google had never booked an ad on TV before; CEO Eric Schmidt quipped on Twitter that someone had said “Hell has indeed frozen over”. The Google blog didn’t reveal much either, only saying that:

we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.

Well either Google’s raking in so much money that splurging US$5mil to “share” a video was no biggie, or it felt it needed to do things differently (I’m personally rooting for the former).

There’s no doubt that people love the ad though (watch it before reading further, there will be spoilers!). It’s one thing to know that Google’s role in indexing the knowledge of the masses has empowered us all, but “Parisian Love” shows its personal, human side.

I was curious how loverboy would have fared wooing his French maiden if he’d only used Bing though. So I did some digging.

“Study Abroad Paris France”

The debut query “study abroad paris france” [Bing] is a tie between Google and Bing; the same site (studyabroad.com) tops the results. Google has the slight edge though, drilling down to the individual page for France and even its summer program.

Google Suggest is also a powerful advantage that Google still has over Bing, it practically tells its own story during the ad. I’m not sure why Bing hasn’t rolled this out. Perhaps they figuring out how to perfect it – keying in common words into Google and looking for the most hilarious Google Suggest results is an entertaining past time.

“Cafes Near The Louve”

.

The next search “cafes near the louve” [Bing] has Google showing Bing who’s the boss. Both engines manage to suggest “Louvre” as the correct spelling for Louve, but Bing guesses wildly with cybercafes and museums, while Google not only gets the context right, but automatically plugs in Google Maps into the results, with reviews to boot!

“Translate Tu Es Très Mignon”

A translation request for “tu es très mignon” [Bing], sees Google ahead again. What loverboy needs is right at the top. Bing not only leaves its translator an additional click away, its translator fails to auto-detect the language:

“Chocolate Shops Paris France”

As we saw earlier, Google shows how it owns search by not only plugging in Google Maps, it has pinpointed ads and shop reviews featured as well, with phone numbers even!

“AA120″

A quick search for (flight) AA120 [Bing] has Microsoft totally stumped, resulting in speaker sound systems instead. Google, on the other hand, not only knows it’s being queried for a flight schedule, it shows the information right in the first row.

Search On!

I assure you I didn’t get paid to write this; I was just curious to see how the results would turn out if I keyed them in. And Google still impresses, 12 years after its launch. I remember using it when it first came out (back then, children, we had ancient sites like Altavista, Lycos, and Ask Jeeves, which all failed to impress) and never touching any other search engine again. When Bing came onto the search scene last year it was touted to finally give Google a run for its money. It had more space for ads, it took over Yahoo! Search, and it had the negotiating muscle of Microsoft behind it.

Google’s romantic narrative, however, may look “cute” , but make no mistake: it’s still light years ahead of Bing when it comes to search. And it all looks simple, fitting flight information, maps, and translations neatly into the results, but it’s surely a front for the most advanced algorithms and tech that made Google what it is today. Google vs Bing is a knockout, for now.

Rumours are that Bing is trying to become the default search engine on the iPhone and Facebook. I can only say that it would be a terrible disservice to us all.

I’ll end here with an ad for Bing – tell me which is better.

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Tags: ad, bing, google, parisian love, search, superbowl, technology, Trends