Microsoft Bing is a new and revamped search engine, which was originally Live Search. With it's release, Microsofts dominance in the search engine arena has been growing.
Is it's growth an effect of the product or marketing? Is Bing only hyped up because of the marketing efforts? I believe so.
Although I am a huge Microsoft fan (and developer), I have been using Google as my primary search engine. I was excited (as with everyone else) when Microsoft introduced Bing and I was excited that my "home team" now has a chance. I was dissapointed when I came across the following issue on the Bing forum.
I have a site containing pages that I don’t want their content being indexed by search engines so all of those pages have
in their header and it has been like this for a while now.
Both Google and Yahoo respected the tag and those pages are not being indexed by them but today I checked and found all those pages even recent ones are indexed and cached on Bing.
Any idea?
I was shocked by the reply...
Hi,
This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to xxxxx@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:
http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*
Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.
Source : Bing Forum
Now for all us who doesn’t understand the implication of this, let me put it this way, many website have pages, which we don’t want to appear in search result. Now to prevent search engines from indexing these pages or stopping them to bring up these pages in search result, we use this “meta” tag. Microsoft not respecting these tags would result in even my test pages showing up in search result, to say the least.
I just hope Microsoft fixes these issues soon, else only “BING” knows what the next search result on Bing brings out. Who knows what else isn't working.