Is Google Deliberately Sabotaging Bing’s Search Listing?

Friday, July 10th, 2009 by Andy Beal

Is Google Deliberately Sabotaging Bing’s Search Listing?

Despite the millions of dollars Microsoft is spending in an attempt to get us to use Bing, it’s apparently still well aware of the hand that feeds it.

A lot of searchers are still conditioned to begin all web browsing at Google, and Microsoft knows that it’s crucial that Bing is easily found. So, you can imagine their angst at seeing the following in a search for Bing:

Yep, the second result for Bing suggests searchers might wan to stick with Google for a while. Now, if you read the snippet, you’ll see why we even got to this situation–a power outage last Friday temporarily took out Bing’s Travel site.

Apparently, Google’s spider has been on vacation since then:

Notice, Google hasn’t re-indexed the page since July 4th! Do you smell a conspiracy theory? Since when does it take Google that long to revisit a site as popular as Bing?

Bing employees may not be crying foul, but they’re disturbed enough to send a public tweet to Google.

It’s kind of hard to puff up your chest and go cap in hand at the same time, don’t you think?

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9 comments on “Is Google Deliberately Sabotaging Bing’s Search Listing?”

Bing Cries Out Loud at Google Says:

July 10th, 2009 at 11:02 am

[...] after 6 hours or so, I noticed that Andy Beal is covering the story in Marketing Pilgrim. So I became a bit curious and tried the search again this time only with the key phrase [...]
Matt Cutts Says:

July 10th, 2009 at 10:53 pm

To answer the question in the headline: no we definitely weren’t deliberately sabotaging Bing’s search listing. I see ~140K pages indexed for [site:bing.com/travel], so it’s not a surprise that some pages got indexed while Bing was down. It’s definitely in the normal range to take a few days for Google to recrawl a page.

Matt Cutts’s last blog post..Making a John Q Public account on Google
Terry Howard Says:

July 11th, 2009 at 10:58 pm

Perhaps they should be paying more attention to their own SERPs, the continuing tragedy that is the results for “search engine” in Bing is just pathetic. Dogpile, AltaVista, WebCrawler, AllTheWeb and 2 (count them 2) results from Wikipedia are in the top 5? I surprised HotBot, Lycos and Inktomi didn’t make the list.

Terry Howard’s last blog post..Formula For Success
Terry Howard Says:

July 11th, 2009 at 10:58 pm

Top 10, I mean to say, but still sorry none the less.

Terry Howard’s last blog post..Formula For Success
Google isn't pinging Bing or ARE THEY? Says:

July 13th, 2009 at 2:49 am

We all love Google but at the end of the day the are a business with they own interests to protect . . . that being said . . . . I think Google make have indexed the page automatically but left it that where untill somebody noticed AUTOMAGICALLY . . . lol . .. . has anyone noticed the new GOOGLE TRY YOUR SEARCH ELSEWHERE????

They are still referring to BING as LIVE – you wouldn’t even notice it if you were not looking for it

“Try your search on Yahoo, Ask, AllTheWeb, Live, Lycos, Technorati, Wikipedia, Bloglines, Altavista, A9, GoodSearch”

Google isn’t pinging Bing or ARE THEY?’s last blog post..McNair’s girlfriend killed former NFLer before shooting self: police
sam Says:

July 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm

What is interesting to me is that Microsoft pays millions in advertising and Paid Search Campaigns to get screwed with by Google’s indexing engines.
Michael Says:

July 14th, 2009 at 2:36 am

I doubt google is doing this, they make so much money there not interested in this balogni
Terry Howard Says:

July 15th, 2009 at 7:19 am

I don’t think you can blame Google for not changing every mention of Live.com to Bing as soon as Microsoft decided to rebrand. They have changed the name of their search engine as often as some people change hair colors. I think if you removed the search industry from the results of a man on the street quiz, most would have no idea they ever changed the name to live.com, much less bing.com

Terry Howard’s last blog post..Formula For Success
Anup Batra Says:

July 22nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm

I am most certain Google is not sabotaging any thing. I have seen this for many other sites…Google usually takes a longer time to re-index because of the gargantuan size of the index. Bing re-indexes faster which is something Google may have to work on.

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