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Comment by yid | Hacker News Reader

Not in this case, no. They were trying to replicate Microsoft's results, which entails using a similar sample size.

I don't think that's quite right. Imagine if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, so I say "coins always come up heads". You don't flip a coin once to prove me wrong.

I think the right thing to do is to conduct a much bigger study, get a much better estimate of the preference distribution, and then derive the % probability of getting a result at least as favorable as the Bing result by pure chance.

If you can show there's only e.g. a 1% chance that the Bing result arose through random variation, then Bing definitely has some tough questions to answer. (e.g. did they run 100 different studies, and just cherry-picked the best result).

Yes, that would have been a great way to do it as well. However, the most interesting aspect of the study to me was that they used Microsoft's methodology, comparable sample sizes, and examined the effect of changing search terms from Microsoft's "recommended" list to ones that study participants suggested themselves.

Incidentally, you don't need a giant sample to estimate the variance on the Google/Bing ratio -- you can use any number of resampling techniques like bootstrapping to get that estimate.

Good point - particularly as it's a fairly simple universe of answers. I wonder if we could get the raw data. But, I do think the Mechanical Turk vs "shopping mall" selection-bias factor overwhelms everything else.

Except they split the sample into three, thereby reducing the sample size (and power) in thirds. What matters is that there are still large enough to run significance tests on, both in the original claim studies and Ayers' study.

(Note: I work for Bing.)

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