Bing, As Fair & Balanced In Search As Fox Is To News

Or How Bing Went Bong!

Since I don’t usually look at every Microsoft oriented article, I seemed to have missed this one yesterday. Apparently it was happening while everyone was worrying, and getting their collective panties in a wad,  over the  semi-imaginary Windows 7 CHKDSK bug.

It appears that Bing is not quite the search engine one might think, as there has been some ‘fine-tuning’ going on with the results.

from CIO online

Just as Bing is gaining popularity, some disturbingly pro-Microsoft and anti-Apple search results rear their ugly  heads.

Oh Microsoft, just when we were starting to believe in this thing called Bing, you go messing with the search results.

Case in point: a search on Bing for the phrase, “Why is Windows so expensive?” returned this as the top link….

“Why are Macs so expensive.”

That’s right. You’re not hallucinating. That was the top response on Bing to a question about the price of Windows.

But it’s not just the top link. The rest of the links on the first search page don’t get much better. There is one link about the price of vinyl windows (actual windows that you look out), one on why Windows hosting providers are so expensive, and one about fish. The five other links on page one are about the expensive price of Macs. The Windows client OS is not even mentioned.
If Microsoft is going to resort to blocking and self-protection with their search engine, they could at least be subtle. This is about as subtle as a machine gun.

I must say that this is beyond anything I thought Microsoft would do. I do know that I had not been happy with the results I had gotten when I was doing my 3-way test of search engines. As I had stated before, Yahoo was giving me the best results, with Google doing ok, but not outstanding, and Bing was simply awful.

Though this might simply be an anomaly, related to Apple and Mac keywords, do we really have the time and effort to search to find when Bing is giving the raw results?  It also could be some sort of insider joke, with no one outside of Microsoft thinking that it would ever be noticed, like Easter Eggs. I know that I was always a bit peeved about Easter Eggs, as I thought that my time and hard drive space was being wasted by the inclusion of these things. I know that for me, life is short, and I cant be bothered. I wonder how many others will share my view.

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