Every now and then someone heads over to Bing and types in a query like “why is Bing so crappy?” or “why is Bing so bad?” I’m not sure how satisfied they are with the answers they find in Bing’s search results. Why Bing is unable to crack the Google barrier is probably not a simple equation, although certainly the leadership at Microsoft (both past and present) has failed to demonstrate much in-depth knowledge of the searchable Web ecosystem. If Steve Ballmer had really grokked Web search he never would have cut a deal with Yahoo!. But let’s not bash Ballmer for not being omnipotent. I can address this question as a Web marketer who made a conscious decision to walk away from Bing as an active channel of traffic for my Websites.
I have explained some of my reasons in the past, but I’ll lay all my cards on the table. Not that I expect anyone at Microsoft to sit up and take notice. In fact, with their recent wave of layoffs you can be sure that Bing is probably understaffed and not high on Satya Nadella’s priority list. Satya has effectively buried Bing and if you’re wondering whether Bing will be around in 5 years you’re not alone; for the first time in 10 years I find myself contemplating a search environment without Microsoft.
Bing Today versus Bing Yesterday
Microsoft has always had a pretty decent search technology. I don’t get why they rebranded Microsoft Live Search to Bing. Then again, I didn’t understand why they rebranded MSN Search to Microsoft Live Search. If there is one thing Microsoft has been completely flaky about in the search market it is the brand by which it wants to be known. I would guess that Microsoft has invested about $1 billion in branding for its search engines.
As far as the algorithmic differences are concerned I concede that Bing today is more robust than Bing was when it began, or Live Search. But that robustness lacks something that was once one of the major strengths of Microsoft-powered search: a commitment to helping Websites.
Today’s Bing is a rather exclusive club for elite Websites. Now, if you are running a search service (and I have done that myself) you have every right to be snobby, exclusive, and elitist. But if you want to compete in organic Web search you cannot afford to pursue that kind of strategy.
In fact, instead of spending $1 billion on marketing 3 search engines Microsoft would have been better off spending that money on the infrastructure they would have been able to use to make their search service ubiquitous. Ubiquity is what made Google big; it certainly wasn’t quality.
When it comes to the quality of search results Bing wins hands down over Google because Bing, unlike Google, is just really, really picky about what it will include in its index. But Bing has proven again what Apple Computers proved decades ago: consumers could not care less about quality.
Back before Google was driving 80% of most marketers’ traffic Microsoft had a real shot at taking organic search market share away from Google. But just as Google began pulling ahead of the field Microsoft began pulling back. Instead of competing on the basis of index size and providing lots of results for every query imaginable, Microsoft decided to build a better search engine.
There was a time when everyone buying computers believed that Apple had the best operating system, hands down. But Apple was just so damned expensive most companies were unwilling to buy their products. So we were all stuck with DOS PCs in the 1980s, and as soon as anyone could make a move to UNIX they got out of Microsoft’s low-quality world. But UNIX systems never really threatened Microsoft’s desktop market dominance because, as many a business decision-maker said to me in the 1980s and 1990s, “I can open the phone book and find a dozen Microsoft consultants; there is only 1 UNIX guy.”
The reason there was only one UNIX guy was that UNIX systems were so stable they didn’t need much consulting. DOS and early Windows, on the other hand, were administrative nightmares. DOS/Windows consulting was to computer-based business then what search engine marketing has been for the past ten to twelve years. Microsoft raked in tens of billions of dollars by putting out really crappy products, and they should have stuck with that formula when it came to Web search because that is what made the difference for Google.
You can find Web spam in Bing’s index, but you won’t find much compared to what is indexed and ranking well in Google. Google killed Bing by NOT trying to provide the best possible search results. Of course, to hear Googlers talk about their search engine, they always put quality first but their idea of quality is more quotidian than Microsoft’s.
If You Want to Spam Bing, Do This
I used to see people complain about not being able to get their sites indexed in Bing all the time. They always assumed that whatever links they used to get their sites indexed and ranking in Google should be good enough for Bing, but that just isn’t how the searchable Web ecosystem works. It never was.
Every search engine has its own index and its own rules. That is why you pretty much waste your time when you use some backlink service to find all your Google backlinks. They don’t know any more about your Google backlinks than you do. You can’t think in terms of how many Google backlinks you have; you have to think in terms of how many backlinks you have, and just accept that only some percentage of those links will be indexed by any given search engine.
But Google indexes more content than Bing; therefore Google indexes more backlinks than Bing. And if Bing is indexing fewer links than Google then Bing is discovering fewer sites than Google.
You would think that with a crawler which is more aggressive than Google’s Bing should be able to find more Websites. But the Bing search engineers ignore a lot of links (or Websites) that Google just falls in love with. Sure, Google has Panda and Penguin to algorithmically slap down sites all over the place, but those sites are still indexed in Google.
To be included in Bing’s index you have to be linked to by sites that Bing trusts. Your list of backlinks from Google, AHrefs, Majestic, or whomever doesn’t tell you anything about what Bing knows or cares about (and this is as true of your backlink reports and Google). The only way you’re going to improve your link-driven Bing traffic is to search via Bing for Websites that are indexed in Bing. Google doesn’t cut the mustard for Bing research.
And assuming you can get your site into Bing you still have to keep it there, which leads me to my next point.
Bing Really Does Require that People Click on Your Listings
For years the organic search marketing community has debated just how much Google relies on click data for “rankings” and “indexing” (very little to not at all, by all accounts I have heard). Meanwhile, the boys over at Microsoft took a narrow POV approach to maintaining a Web index. They set some very high thresholds. If you don’t get enough clicks on your pages they just dump your sorry content.
Duane Forrester has confirmed this publicly, but we didn’t need Duane to tell us what the Bing Site Search was showing us. On a site with thousands of pages indexed in Google it’s pretty obvious Bing is being stingy when you can only find a few dozen to a few hundred pages in Bing.
If everything else was equal we could use the 4:1 ratio of Google to Bing organic search referrals to say that Bing’s index must be about 25% the size of Google’s index, but I suspect it is much smaller. So it’s really not that Bing is a bad search engine or a crappy search engine; it is that Bing is a small search engine, compared to Google.
Basic math would tell anyone who cared to do the numbers that the more content you index from the Web the more search results pages you can show to your visitors; and the more SERPs you show your visitors the more time they spend on your site. Bing’s share of the search advertising pie would have been much larger by now had Microsoft put down its slide rules and used the Calculator program.
Now, Microsoft’s engineers have occasionally offered bland rebuttals to this kind of thinking. But I actually USE Bing as a search engine. I have set Bing as my default search tool in at least two of my browsers. I go out of my way to force myself to use Bing before I use Google. And yet I still use Google more often than I use Bing because there just isn’t anything to click on in Bing’s search results.
If Bing won’t give me something to click on then it’s no wonder Bing keeps dumping pages from its index for not earning enough clicks. It’s just insane how they refuse to show you useful content that Google has no problem finding.
But wait: didn’t I say above that Bing has the better search results? I did. And it’s true. That is because I don’t have to worry about what I am clicking on in Bing’s SERPs. If Bing actually shows me something in response to a query I have come to trust that it’s going to be relevant and pretty darned good. It’s just that half the time it’s either not what I am looking for or I know it’s an incomplete reference.
But there was a time when you COULD get a lot of your content indexed in Bing, and keep it there. I did that for years on multiple Websites. While most marketers were complaining about not getting any organic search referral traffic from Bing I was getting about 1/3 of my search traffic from Bing. ONE…THIRD.
In April 2011, Bing Shot Itself In the Head
The Bing Developer Team dropped this bombshell on the Web marketing community in February 2011. They announced they would discontinue the Siteowner tool in April (and they did, by golly).
The Bing Siteowner tool was to site search what the Google Custom Search Engine is, except that unlike Google’s CSE solution Bing’s tool had a direct influence on its main Web index.
With the Google CSE Google is more willing to index some of that spooky content that you want to publish. They won’t show everything in their main Web index they know about, but they will show all that crap in their CSE results.
Bing, on the other hand, simply powered its Siteowner tool with its main Web search results. So what happened was you would put a Bing site search widget on your site, people would use it, and they would see Bing search results but in a slightly different mode than from what you’ll see today. You see, Bing was counting those site search clicks for your pages, and that helped ensure your pages stayed in Bing.
I was able to double my Bing organic referral traffic in a month on any Website simply by putting a Bing Siteowner tool on that site. Using a Google Custom Search Engine did nothing for improving my Google organic referrals. So it was like Bing had handed me a Get-out-of-Jail card. I didn’t have to worry about keeping my content in Bing’s index because Bing was doing that for me.
And all that went away in April 2011. My Bing traffic fell down a black hole and so did my Bing-indexed content. It didn’t matter that I had tens of thousands of links pointing to my sites. Bing slowly shed itself of all those links, and along with the links that were dumped from the index I lost my organic Bing traffic.
That was when I finally gave up on trying to optimize for Bing. It just became too hard because I didn’t want to have to go looking for Bing-compatible links. Websites that Google loves were just not showing up in Bing.
What Microsoft Should Have Done with Bing
So let’s look at the SiteOwner tool. Microsoft removed that because “too few people were using it”. If that was really the reason then what they should have done, rather than sitting on their thumbs, was get out there and tell Webmasters how to use the tool and WHY they should use the tool. It’s too late now because if you put Bing site search on your site not only will Bing not show most of your pages, the clicks won’t help.
Microsoft had a battleship going up against Google’s tugboat and they mothballed the thing. Google CSE today is better than it was in 2011 but it’s still the ugly step-child of site search. I almost never bother with Google CSE any more, except to stay slightly current in its capabilities. If I had my druthers I would druther use Bing for site search, but they won’t index all my pages so their site search is completely worthless.
That makes Bing a crappy search engine for any Webmaster who wants a better site search tool than Google CSE.
In addition to promoting the site search tool Microsoft should have been far more straight-forward with Webmasters about just how important it was to get people to click on your listings in their search results. It would have been smarter, of course, to not be that stingy with their index but that’s my next point.
Microsoft should have indexed all the spammy crap that Google indexes and shows to people. Sure, Googlers don’t like spam and I don’t like spam either but let’s face it: these algorithms are terrible at differentiating between absolute crappy spam and marginally useful content that provides at least SOME unique value. Google at least gives the unique value a slight chance of helping someone; Microsoft could not care less.
This kind of search incompetence starts at the top and trickles down. Mister Ballmer may have been serious about building Bing’s search share but he didn’t know what he was doing. I’m not sure about Satya Nadella; I get the sense that he has absolutely no interest in Bing and that he’ll try to get rid of it in a year or two. I would not be surprised if Microsoft tries to sell Bing to Yahoo! at some point. They’ll both make money on THAT deal because Marissa Mayer DOES kind of grok search, as I recall.
For some reason Microsoft just threw in the towel when it came to building up a search engine. They settled for “second best”, and financially that kind of made sense. After all, Microsoft doesn’t need to be number 1 in the organic search market; it just needs to make a profit on its search advertising business.
That is all Microsoft really cared about: the search advertising. And unfortunately guys like Danny Sullivan have been dutifully reporting on “search market share” as measured by advertising inventory (page views) because that is what the industry metrics companies settled on (comScore, Nielsen, et. al.). It’s not Danny’s fault that we have had to live with crappy search market share reports for 15 years; that is the search engines’ fault, because they have been reluctant to talk about how much traffic they send to other sites.
For organic search marketing the only share you should be caring about is how many referrals Search Engine X sends you every day. How many page views the dumb thing gets doesn’t mean anything to you, your future, or anyone else’s future (unless you are buying PPC ads in the SERPs).
Can Microsoft Turn This Around?
Sure. Even now, after all these years of making really stupid technical decisions and refusing to create a solid global brand, Microsoft could still pull the fat out of the fire. But they would have to take search seriously enough to A) put someone who groks search in charge of that line of business and B) support that person rather than isolate him/her.
I just have no faith whatsoever in Satya Nadella. He has done absolutely nothing to support Bing while following the usual “new CEO” strategy of laying off people in order to please investors. Sooner or later he’ll run out of jobs to kill and he’ll have to start showing some real leadership. It’s doubtful he’ll be able to do that in 2-3 years but Microsoft does have a history of standing by its CEOs no matter how dumb they act. Even Bill Gates acted like a moron on a few occasions until he finally grokked the Internet. That’s when he woke up and said Microsoft had to take this online stuff seriously, and that was the day Bill Gates grew up.
Microsoft is betting everything on the Cloud, Enterprise Software, and maybe Mobile. While these seem like shrewd decisions Microsoft is only positioned to do well in Enterprise software. If I had to lay down money today on who will emerge as the new Cloud leader in 2 years, I would bet on Mark Hurd and Oracle. They have their own critics and skeptics to deal with but Hurd has been in place for several years (in a functional capacity). And he cuts deals. He groks growth, I think, better than Satya Nadella.
If Mister Nadella cannot get his head out of the Cloud and work with Microsoft’s other assets he is going to make Microsoft investors long for the days of Steve Ballmer. But like I said above, I don’t think that will happen.
About the best thing Microsoft can do for everyone right now is put a “For Sale” sign on Bing and find someone who actually cares about search to take it over. That might work. And, oddly enough, Yahoo! does seem to be acting like it may want to get back into the search engine game. Maybe Apple is, too. Heck, at this point Jeff Bezos would be a better candidate for growing Bing into a viable search company.