Mar12Written by:Will
3/12/2010
Today is the second day of my personal challenge to myself to give the Bing “decision engine” another full test run. Today, I didn’t really have to search a whole lot. When I did, they were very simple searches. I am finding that searches that are not targeted to specific websites or technologies work pretty well. When I go outside that scope, I begin to see the searches go from slightly different, to completely different, in comparison to Google.
Like I said, the searches today were uneventful. I mostly got what I was looking for with similar effort that I’d expect from Google. There was only a single exception.
Image Search
I used the image search pretty extensively today. I was very pleased with it. The searches executed and returned results very fast, and the results appeared to be completely relevant. I think it goes without saying that the entire page looked much nicer than Google too. :)
Vanity Search
Have you heard of a “vanity search?” Well, let’s make sure… A vanity search is when you search for your own name on a search engine. For example, I might search for “will strohl” or “william strohl.” Since I go by “Will” in pretty much every circle of my life, that is what I usually search on. I realize that this may present an interesting challenge to search engine programmers, as the short form of my name is a common word, offering little to no context.
When I performed the vanity search on Bing, I was surprised a great deal to no see myself on the first page. This is not due to conceit. I spend a great deal of time in SEO efforts to get my name to return relevant results. Unfortunately, Bing has decided to ignore those efforts completely. I did not show up until their second page of results. If my settings were different, I would have been on the third page.
As you can see above, there are mixed results. There are plenty of results for “strohl,” but nothing for “will.” I was surprised to see results instead for people of the same surname, but with names like David, Pamela, or Greg. It is very clear that Bing doesn’t know that “will” is also a name. This is interesting though. When you factor in that Bing most definitely recognized “strohl” as being a surname, it is disappointing to see that the same programming logic wasn’t used to make the same decision. If it did, then it was a complete failure. With Bing being marketed as a “decision engine,” this is an overwhelming failure in decision making. In fact, it makes their commercials seem more funny – for the wrong reason.
This same search in Google renders me as every single search result on the first page of search results. This same search in the past used to be dominated by a bunch of results from the Strohl Systems company. So, it is clear that I have been doing pretty well in optimizing for one of the search engines. :)
That’s it for day two. Since the next two days are the weekend, I do not expect to have much to report until Monday, but we’ll see.