londrum - 5:40 pm on May 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

is Bing going to be any better for webmasters, though? they do a few things right now that worry me a bit, and makes me think they will just end up like google, leaching off us webmasters.

take their image search. everyone complained when google started putting an extra gate between the image thumbnail and our sites. bing has implemented a similar gate. its impossible to go in one click from the thumbnail to our sites. you have to go via another Bing page first. they just want to use our images to keep traffic on their site -- just like google.

the worst example for me, is what they are doing for tourist attractions. a lot of the big famous attractions now include paid info at the top of the SERPs -- not an advert, but actual info that Bing presumably buys from Frommers, and includes above the official website (madame tussauds is a good example). that is no different from google polluting the first page of the SERPs with all their place pages.

i definitely want Bing to get more search share, but a couple of years from now i'm guessing webmasters will be complaining about their practices too