Why does Bing give such bizarre search results.

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I was doing a little ‘ego searching’ today and I found out something fairly alarming about Bing (Microsoft’s search engine).  When I typed in ‘tribeswell’ I received several results of sites that were linked to mine, but my actual website wasn’t even on the first page.

This is really weird to me.  I know that Bing claims that it is a different kind of search engine (a decision engine), but this just doesn’t make sense.  I can see that references to my site could be useful for someone looking for information about my company, but wouldn’t my actual website be useful as well?

I can honestly say that Bing seems to me to be a pretty useful tool for finding information, but this is pretty alarming to me.  Am I missing something here?

Update:

I did a little research about how Bing ranks search results and it appears that it considers domain age as a major factor of relevance (whether or not this makes sense for the search).  Since my domain was purchased only a few months ago, this could be a major reason for this discrepancy.

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  • rickwilkerson

    Well, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Relevance = relevance, not longevity. Google has a similar issue but not to that degree so far as i can tell. I'm constantly having to go to the “recent results” tab in Google searches in order to avoid old, outdated crap.

    Bing should re-weight the algorithm to give more strength to the actual domain rather than older domains linking to it.

  • Anonymous

    Well, that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Relevance = relevance, not longevity. Google has a similar issue but not to that degree so far as i can tell. I’m constantly having to go to the “recent results” tab in Google searches in order to avoid old, outdated crap.

    Bing should re-weight the algorithm to give more strength to the actual domain rather than older domains linking to it.

    • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

      Yeah it’s kink of funny to me that Google’s competitors think they can rewrite the search engine value curve with new algorithms. It is extremely difficult to pull users off one engine to start using another.

      It would be easier for people to pick a search engine if they all used the same algorithm and just had different user interfaces. I know that’s not possible, but it would be interesting.

      Still, it makes no sense to put so much stock in domain name age. These days it is becoming almost irrelevant.

      • Anonymous

        Actually I like the idea of the competition trying different algorithms but they need to be innovative and sensible, not just different for different’s sake. Without Google reinventing search, we might still be stuck playing with Meta tag cramming and other stupid search tricks instead of building actual site value.

        Speaking of domain age, yeah, that’s about as relevant as Meta tags. ;-)

        • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

          Exactly, contenders in the search space need to think about being different so they can be better, not just different for the sake of being different.

  • rickwilkerson

    Well, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Relevance = relevance, not longevity. Google has a similar issue but not to that degree so far as i can tell. I'm constantly having to go to the “recent results” tab in Google searches in order to avoid old, outdated crap.

    Bing should re-weight the algorithm to give more strength to the actual domain rather than older domains linking to it.

  • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

    Yeah it's kink of funny to me that Google's competitors think they can rewrite the search engine value curve with new algorithms. It is extremely difficult to pull users off one engine to start using another.

    It would be easier for people to pick a search engine if they all used the same algorithm and just had different user interfaces. I know that's not possible, but it would be interesting.

    Still, it makes no sense to put so much stock in domain name age. These days it is becoming almost irrelevant.

  • rickwilkerson

    Actually I like the idea of the competition trying different algorithms but they need to be innovative and sensible, not just different for different's sake. Without Google reinventing search, we might still be stuck playing with Meta tag cramming and other stupid search tricks instead of building actual site value.

    Speaking of domain age, yeah, that's about as relevant as Meta tags. ;-)

  • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

    Yeah it's kink of funny to me that Google's competitors think they can rewrite the search engine value curve with new algorithms. It is extremely difficult to pull users off one engine to start using another.

    It would be easier for people to pick a search engine if they all used the same algorithm and just had different user interfaces. I know that's not possible, but it would be interesting.

    Still, it makes no sense to put so much stock in domain name age. These days it is becoming almost irrelevant.

  • rickwilkerson

    Actually I like the idea of the competition trying different algorithms but they need to be innovative and sensible, not just different for different's sake. Without Google reinventing search, we might still be stuck playing with Meta tag cramming and other stupid search tricks instead of building actual site value.

    Speaking of domain age, yeah, that's about as relevant as Meta tags. ;-)

  • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

    Exactly, contenders in the search space need to think about being different so they can be better, not just different for the sake of being different.

  • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

    Exactly, contenders in the search space need to think about being different so they can be better, not just different for the sake of being different.

  • http://tribeswell.com Colin Clark

    Exactly, contenders in the search space need to think about being different so they can be better, not just different for the sake of being different.

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