[panacea]

>the way it looks is secondary to its primary function: giving you good results.

I'm honestly not trying to be mean, but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

People aren't necessarily doing quantitative A/B tests between search engines, they're just plugging the latest search terms they want answers to into the search field and (in many cases) getting a search result that seems to fit the bill.

If the search engine displays results in an visually uncluttered (seemingly authoritative) way then that would seem like a good search engine choice.

There was that blog post the other day where someone updated and improved their site design and was lauded by users for all the new features they had introduced, when all they'd done was refresh the design.

[splatterdash]

> I'm honestly not trying to be mean,

Hey, no problem :), I'm just here for the discussion.

> but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

I do understand that looks matter to a degree. Some website redesigns does make them much more appealing. But I feel like at best the effects are only temporary. It doesn't take long before the user gets bored and thinks about how ugly it looks, unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

Moreover, I mentioned earlier that it doesn't seem beneficial for Bing that its redesign is a reminder of its competitor. So I still find their decision puzzling.

[panacea]

>unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

The redesign, in-and-of-itself likely provides added f/f in terms of reduced cognitive load in parsing the search results page. It's simple and easily grokked.

>a reminder of its competitor.

I don't think anyone is definitively and quantifiably testing Google search results in their day to day lives, but I suspect there's a nagging sense that they're not really as 'good' as they used to be.

I speculate that it's because the results have become more cluttered. Very few people would consciously compare Bing 2.today with Google 2.yesterday.

I think it's a clever play. It will probably not pan out as it's difficult to turn a ship as large as "Default Search" in another direction but we live in interesting times.