I spotted an unusual alert at the top of the Bing search results this week – they were asking searchers whether they would recommend Bing to friends and colleagues.

When you click through, it asks you to answer “How likely are you to recommend Bing to a friend or colleague?” with five options to answer:

• Definitely would not
• Probably would not
• Might or Might not (sic; yes, they capitalized the second “might”)
• Probably would
• Definitely would

It was interesting that they chose to put the negative options first – usually surveys tend to start with the most positive first.

However, when I clicked the “Return to Bing” button, it completely closed the tab – which happened to be the tab I was searching Bing in.  I suspect it was meant to open in a new tab or a pop up, and the return to Bing option was to close the pop-up to show the search results in the window/tab below.

Bing did miss a golden marketing opportunity to then ask searchers to actually recommend it to friends or colleagues.  It would have been a nice touch to add a button with “Want to recommend us now?  Click here!”

It also hints that Bing wants to go after the business market more.  Usually when surveys ask about recommendations, it is the standard “family and friends” while Bing decided to use the “friend or colleague” option instead.

That said, despite a few flaws in the system, it is nice to see Bing looking for feedback from users.