Too Much Bling Going On With Bing

Bing is really coming along nicely, no question about it. And on the functionality front, Bing is stomping Google into the ground. Now all of this praise out of the way, there is still a problem. People are becoming entirely too excited about the presentation and not concerned enough with the shaky relevancy results.

To be fair, I think that Bing does fine with some queries, but many queries important to myself personally, I find that Bing falls flat on its face. And speaking of face, what is up with all of this irrelevant love for Facebook in search results? I am sorry, but anytime a query for “Matt Hartley” is bringing up results from Facebook over that of MattHartley.com…clearly something is seriously skewed.

Why do I care? Because it is bringing up results for a Matt Hartley on Facebook that simply happens to be totally random. He has no online presence, he is not even the well published Matt Hartley for the Globe and Mail for gripes sake! At least that, would be a relevant result as that guy is well known.

But Bing’s skew goes deeper than this. Even with problem solving queries, I find that Bing’s skew becomes SO blatant, that it is AMAZING that no one is picking up how slanted its results really are. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Do a query on Google and Bing and tell me who is coming up first. Give me a break. While in both cases, Windows is clearly the OS in question. Offering up Microsoft.com as the first result is pushing the relevancy a bit.

Then again, Bing saves face on the query “Music Player”. Results there are equal with both Google And Bing. So it seems that the skew may not be intentional in the previous example. But nevertheless, it does bother me regardless.