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Bing still isn't better than Windows Live search

June 19, 2009 by Noah
Checking my site's HTTP referrer logs to see what pages out there link to me, I occasionally saw links coming in from the Windows Live search engine...

Links for simple search terms, such as "picture", or "blog", or "Linux"...

From URLs that indicated the link came from the very first page of search results that Windows Live provided for those simple, generic, single-word search queries.

Thusly I concluded that Windows Live Search is complete crap, and is probably powered by a primitive SQL query that has no regard at all for relevance, no "page rank" technology, and otherwise nothing at all that determines what results are the "best" ones to show to the user. Google would never let such things fly. Getting a link to my site because you searched for the word "picture", and one or two pages on my site might've used the word in passing? That's a big FAIL.

So, now that Bing is out, and it's all over the news and Digg about how great it is and how it's (finally) a competitor for Google, I was hoping that if I got any links in from Bing searches, that they'd be from more useful search queries.

I was wrong!

I was just looking at my incoming referrers, and somebody who did an Images search for "Acer Aspire" linked to my site (this page, specifically)... from the first page of results. I had to check this out. Sure enough, the 10th image that comes up for that query is the picture of an Acer Aspire 5050 laptop that I included on that page.

The 10th result. Is my site about the Acer Aspire at all? About laptops period, even? Why, when there's SO many other sites out there that are more relevant, would my site come up in the top 10 results? It's broken. As usual.

Microsoft should just give up on the search scene altogether. MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Bing... no matter what they call it, it's the same exact failure of a search engine. Hopefully they'll learn their lesson after this and not try again with yet another search engine in the next couple years and just give up completely.

For the most relevant results for your search queries, Google is still the best.

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