Suggest a Bing improvement

Let's make a G competitor better

[aleksl]

I'd like to suggest some improvements to the Bing "experience", just because Google no longer listens to webmasters, and because we need a stronger competitor so Google finally wakes up and starts improving search FOR THE USER, not for the bottom line. OR ELSE.

I will start:

1. Get rid of shopping comparison sites on top of the SERPs for searches on products. Or hide it in SERPs. I don't want to see #1-3 sites for a product to be just aggregators, some actual stores would be nice, you know.

2. Rethink what is actually called "Brands". In my niche we have 2 sites that have 0 brands, just your local run-of-the-mill ecommerce store and an affiliate "comparison" site dominate "Brands" category.

3. In both Brands and Reviews, sites are listed more than once in SERPs. Why would I want to see 2 ConsumerSomethingReviews.blah as #1 and #2 results?

4. Image search is flaky. Try surfing with Javascript turned off - which I do on occasion when I think I may get questionable sites in results. It is just impossible, none of the images are clickable. Safe Search on/off shouldn't be javascript either.

My 2 cents.

[eeek]

5. Actually spider the web.

[BillyS]

6. Buy Y!

[eeek]

6. Buy Y!

Why? Yahoo doesn't spider much either. You can't win (or even place) in search unless you have the database of web content to search.

[Digmen1]

I agree with Aleksl.
We need some competition for Google.
I like Bing.
Images needs a lot of work, if I search for coffee mug holders I get guys faces (mugs) and coffee mugs (with no holders)
I also get a lot of duplicate search results, ie two sites right on top of each other. This is a pain !
Also it would be good if Bing or Google got a bit more relevant with some of the searches eg don't put a website that was last updated 4 years ago (eg forums) in the top 3 search results.

[jmccormac]

Act on sitemap submissions.

Regards...jmcc

[aleksl]

I got one more:

7. Rethink and REDESIGN(!) how your search referrers work. I get tons of referrers in our log for one-word BIG KWs which I know we just don't rank. So all this Ajax-javascript mumbo-jumbo is not helping webmasters to see actual keywords user searched for, and a final page on Bing where user found a link.

[leadegroot]

@aleksl: if you do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP giving you those single keyword referrers, you will probably find it is msnbot.
Known problem - lots of people have asked them to stop it.

[anallawalla]

Crawl 100% of the visited sites. Although I prefer the Bing results, I know that barely 5 to 10% of a site gets indexed.

[tangor]

I have a 2,000ish+ page hobby site. Google finds 143 pages. Consistently. Yahoo is 1100ish pages. Teoma finds 1300 pages. Bing finds 1800 pages. Some of the others I allow find a few more, but most of the pages they "find" aren't MY PAGES! (eating 403s!).

Recently Bing is sending more traffic than Google. Of the 143 pages they have indexed all the rest of my site is visible to the visitor, if they click on something here or there... but ASK and BING send me direct traffic. Very interesting, to say the least.

As this is a hobby site, with no monetization involved, it is a curious idiosyncrasy that several search engines can find my content and Google can't. (I am taking into consideration my robots.txt in this observation). Bing works for me. Google doesn't.