incrediBILL - 12:56 am on Mar 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

They need to clean up some obvious legacy stuff that'll make everyone happy before bolting yet more garbage on top. The problem with Bing and all the other SEs is they keep trying to one-up each other with new features yet the bozos never go back and try to finally tackle some real common core issues that have been a problem with their services since the beginning. Adding fancy webmaster tools and such is nice, but if you can't get more people using the search, it's a big fat why bother.

I think if Bing started by focusing on just the following:

- Original authorship detection, several simple solutions possible, one as simple as creating an independent non-profit verified authorship registry. Let authors pay a nominal fee to register sites creating original content, hire a few people to do the validation, kind of how Yahoo Directory originally worked.

- Spam and dupe content detection

- Stop crawling and indexing via proxies (idiots)

- Include more authoritative curated content and/or allow searchers to assist curating content and use it as a method of training the algo as to the intent of the search vs. the desired result. Basically a reciprocal of suggesting search terms to the user as in allowing the user to suggest the best results for those terms to the SE itself.

- Stop running all the paranoid abusive spider crap that webmasters complain about endlessly in the spider forum, it's bad PR at a minimum and millions of annoyed webmasters tend not to promote your service.

If Bing can crack a few of those nuts, making their spidering more intelligent, faster, more secure, less annoying, etc. they'd certainly make webmasters happy and in the process probably make surfers happy as well.

I think the task is doable but may not be 100% algorithmic and Bing may need a take a more integrated curated approach to the problem and let their audience participate in the end results.

Aggregator sites are the real problem as many are useful by integrating, sorting and filtering multiple feeds into something digestible but just how many do you need on a specific topic?

Let the end users decide, either on a user-by-user basis or simply consolidate the preferences of all the users and dump the rest of the junk at the bottom of the SERPs, way down.