The times, they are a-changin'...slightly...
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Bing bong, it’s a bomb!
How a search engine can do you some real damage.
June 2009
The relaunch of Microsoft Live as Bing.com, and launch of Google Wave has put the focus back onto the search engine world.
Bing has a pleasing interface and interesting features in the enhanced rollover related page links. It looks serious in its efforts to take on Google at its own game. Dig a little further and it seems there are some hazards lurking.
I was intrigued by the information within the rollover related page links and looked into how these were derived.
There does not seem to be a lot of consistency in how these appear. Although they are generally relevant and direct through to related content, there were some surprising anomalies. A bit of hands-on research showed that html sites seem to be handled well.
Moving onto Flash sites I searched for a site I know is a highly graphic and interactive flash – ‘Daisy Marc Jacobs’.
This turned up a number of URLS that linked through to the site, as one would expect. There were multiple domains for .com and .co.uk, and even sub pages that were recognized as separate listings. The interesting – and rather worrying – feature was the wording of mouseover pop-up links which clearly stated ‘Marc Jacobs spammed me this page’
The inference in these links is that the pop-up content is contained within the page result shown. Looking into the source code of the page it was clear there was no such link on the page.
Expanding the search revealed that there was one page online with ‘Marc Jacobs spammed me this page’. It was on a Dutch blog post from 2007.
What seems to be happening is that Bing are using inbound link text in the related links pop-ups, rather than the outbound links from the page. The very real concern with this is the absolute lack of control that a site has over the text applied to an inbound link.
Google experienced something similar with Googlebombing until they sorted out their algorithm. Generally this relied on a savvy user actively searching for a specific term such as ‘complete failure’.
For Microsoft the problem is that the unsuspecting web searcher will be presented with a ‘Bing bomb’ in their rollover related pages.
The only question is whether Bing will raise its profile enough that someone will put the effort into creating a Bing bomb.
Guy Hatton
