Why does Bing give such bizarre search results.

Posted by Colin Clark on Oct 16th, 2009 | Comments home title

I was doing a little ‘ego searching’ today and I found out something fairly alarming about Bing (Microsoft’s search engine). When I typed in ‘tribeswell’ I received several results of sites that were linked to mine, but my actual website wasn’t even on the first page.

This is really weird to me. I know that Bing claims that it is a different kind of search engine (a decision engine), but this just doesn’t make sense. I can see that references to my site could be useful for someone looking for information about my company, but wouldn’t my actual website be useful as well?

I can honestly say that Bing seems to me to be a pretty useful tool for finding information, but this is pretty alarming to me. Am I missing something here?

Update:

I did a little research about how Bing ranks search results and it appears that it considers domain age as a major factor of relevance (whether or not this makes sense for the search). Since my domain was purchased only a few months ago, this could be a major reason for this discrepancy.

Bug testers: Google is clean, Bing is buggy (news.cnet.com)
Bing’s Traffic Spike From Fake Spam Tests? (seroundtable.com)
Analyst: Google Bests Bing For Relevance (paidcontent.org)
Search Marketers: Time To Move Marketing Budgets To Bing / adCenter (seroundtable.com)

rickwilkerson

Well, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Relevance = relevance, not longevity. Google has a similar issue but not to that degree so far as i can tell. I'm constantly having to go to the "recent results" tab in Google searches in order to avoid old, outdated crap.

Bing should re-weight the algorithm to give more strength to the actual domain rather than older domains linking to it.

Colin Clark

Yeah it's kink of funny to me that Google's competitors think they can rewrite the search engine value curve with new algorithms. It is extremely difficult to pull users off one engine to start using another.

It would be easier for people to pick a search engine if they all used the same algorithm and just had different user interfaces. I know that's not possible, but it would be interesting.

Still, it makes no sense to put so much stock in domain name age. These days it is becoming almost irrelevant.

rickwilkerson

Actually I like the idea of the competition trying different algorithms but they need to be innovative and sensible, not just different for different's sake. Without Google reinventing search, we might still be stuck playing with Meta tag cramming and other stupid search tricks instead of building actual site value.

Speaking of domain age, yeah, that's about as relevant as Meta tags. ;-)

Colin Clark

Exactly, contenders in the search space need to think about being different so they can be better, not just different for the sake of being different.