How does Bing determine the age of a website?

I've got two theories, and was wondering if someone could help me out.

[swirl]

Hi!

Does Bing define the "age" of a website based on how long it has been in the Bing index, or when the domain name associated with the website was created? Is it also possible that Bing determines the age based on the first instance it finds within its database of a link pointing to the domain name in question?

Thanks in advance for any comments and advice.

My theory:

Bing determines the age of a website based on the length of time it has been in the index. This makes the process of determining the age less susceptible to manipulation. It also probably makes it easier (from a computational resource standpoint) to assign an age to a website. I'm not sure if this is accurate though.

[mack]

I'm not convinced that Bing pays as much attention to site age as Google. It has been mentioned quite a lot lately about people achieving good rank on fairly new or totally new sites. Personally I have seen brand new domains rank well within a matter of a couple of weeks.

I actually think this is a good way to go about it, age may indicate maturity, but it says very little regarding quality.

Mack.

[swirl]

Hi Mack!

Thank you for your reply! I appreciate it.

Your comment about the age of a site not being weighed as heavily by Bing is thought provoking.

I'm asking this from the perspective of being intellectually curious about the subject...

Presumably there's a mechanism that Bing uses to measure/determine the "age" of a website. I hear what you're saying about it not necessarily being given much weight as a ranking factor.

But sticking for a moment to the question of what process Bing uses to determine website "age"...

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that age is measured by how long a website has been in the Bing index as opposed to using domain name registration data. Are you (or anyone else reading this) aware of any evidence that might suggest Bing has the computational infrastructure to collect/measure/analyze domain name registration data?

Swirl