Bing UK search engine
Bing UK Search Engine
If you are one of the few people in the UK that use MSN search engines, you will see that as soon as you put a search string into an MSN search box, you are taken to BING.
Bing is Microsoft’s new attempt to challenge Google in the search engine wars, but purely on search, it doesn’t come close to challenging Google. Bing has some pretty features, but if we look at the main reason people use a search engine - to search for products, services and information - Bing UK is the same old mess that MSN have offered for the past three years on UK searches. Apparently, Microsoft are going to spend 100 million dollars advertising Bing, but that money would be better spent on a search engine that gave worthwhile results!
Bing’s poor search results
I have to be honest and point out that I’ve only done a handful of searches on Bing UK, but each one of them gave the same old useless results.
Example 1
As I was working on the designer-cakes.com website this morning, the first search I tried was designer cakes. If you search it yourself, you’ll see there are supposed to be 4.85 million results, yet the first page of results on the Bing UK search engine shows 2 results from designer-cakes.com, 2 results from designercakes.co.uk, 2 from designer-cakes.co.uk, 2 from designercake.co.uk, 1 from designercakesltd.co.uk and 1 from fabcakes.co.uk. If you then click on the UK only version of the Bing search engine, there are only 345,000 results to pick from, but lo and behold, the same sites are featured, although those with a .co.uk TLD are given a bit more relevance than on the web search of the UK Bing. Like the old MSN search products, if you have the search term in your domain name, you’ll get preference in SERPs on Bing UK. There doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that.
Example 2
I searched for the term Wedding Cakes - as if my magic, the site wedding-cakes.co.uk is top of the list and five of the other named sites have wedding cakes in their domain name. In this search, designer-cakes.com comes in at number 6 of 6,140,000 results, but when I check Bing’s uk only searches, designer-cakes.com doesn’t come in to the first ten pages of the Bing index. Why? Because Bing’s simplistic view of a UK site, is that it should either be a .co.uk or have the term wedding cakes in the URL. There are .com entries from page 21 onwards that don’t have the term in the URL, but quite frankly, that’s pathetic.
You would think that before launching a Bing to a worldwide audience, Microsoft would have given their robots the ability to recognise that a .com site hosted in the UK is every bit as British as a .co.uk site and not to rely on domain names so much when ranking sites in the Bing index?
The rest of Bing UK isn’t bad at all and has some fairly nifty features, but I’ll be sticking with Google until Microsoft get the basics of returning good search results to Bing right. How hard can it be?
3 Responses to “Bing UK search engine”
June 26th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I don’t think that Bing will be successful until Microsoft sort out their indexing issues. For example, sites that have almost all their pages indexed in Google have barely 20% indexed in Bing.Therefore Bing is not seeing most of the web.
I wish Microsoft would sort this out - they have millions at their disposal and the brightest people working for them.
Lovin your blog Rob! BM
August 17th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Small sites do really well on google and yahoo! (which is soon to be powered by bing, heaven help us). I can get #1 position in searches for “sarmouni” and “Idries Shah successor” and yet hardly show at all in bing. Looks like they’re after authoritative backlinks and these are hard to come by for the “little people”.
With the greatest respect Eric and not wishing to be rude in any way, Sarmouni and Idries Sha successor are very simple keywords. All you need to do is repeat the term Sarmouni, Idries Sha and the search term, Idries Sha Successor three times on a page of content, stick in a page title something like: Idries Shah, writer, Sufi teacher - Idries Shah successor - Sarmouni, and you would be on the front page of Google in ten minutes. Your issue with Bing isn’t lack of links, it’s twofold: your site is a sub-domain, which Bing won’t rank highly in their algorythm and your site is down more often than it is up. I would suggest you buy Idriesshasuccessor.com and have it professionally hosted, on a reliable host, optimise the page and Bing will rank your website.
By the way, I completely agree with your Yahoo and Bing comment Eric - god help us! BM
August 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Our website appears in second position on the first page of Google UK for the search term “foam moulders”
We are a UK company but have a .com domain name. In Bing for the same search term, foam moulders, again we are in second position on first page for “show all” but we dont appear anywhere for the “Only from United Kingdom” results!
Come on Bing! just because we dont have a .co.uk name doesn’t mean we are not a UK company!
I couldn’t agree with you more Duncan. I’m not sure what a foam moulder is, but I’m heading of to your site just now to check it out! Just had a look and noticed you only have the term foam moulders appearing once on the page as a phrase. If foam moulders is an important term for you, Try re-arranging tyour sentances so you can add two more instances of the term on the page and take out a singular instance of foam. It could be enough for you to move one or two places up Google ranking for the term. BM