In early July, I wanted to see if we could add Lucire to Bing as a news source in their Pubhub—after all, Google has us as one, as Yahoo, Altavista and Excite had back in the day. And I’d say that 25 years of publishing with an international team might qualify us as being media.
The folks came back rejecting us, saying we needed to come back in a month’s time. Usual story: look at our rules, you must have messed up.
Bing tells everyone this these days, because it’s a good way to keep webmasters confounded as they try to figure out what’s wrong with their site and why they can’t get it listed. It’s the same with Pubhub.
The one “rule” that might be very broadly interpreted in their favour was that articles needed to have bylines. Granted, a lot of news ones don’t, since sometimes we don’t want credit for them, and you don’t always see a reporter’s name for shorter, simpler items. But features do have bylines. And when Bing swung round in early July, coincidentally I had written quite a lot of the last bunch of articles, so my name was all over them. That was a no-no.
So here we are, a month and a few days on. The home page (the one that Bing declines to include in their index now, as it prefers pages from the early 2000s that we haven’t linked to for over 17 years) contains articles from me, Stanley Moss, Lola Cristall, Jody Miller, and Elyse Glickman. There’s one story on Panos Papadopoulos that he wrote in the first person.
What’s the bet that nothing will happen?
Sometimes you have to give it a go, even when you know nothing will happen—just to prove a point.
Above: The top pages in a site:lucire.com search on Bing. Five of these pages we haven’t linked to in 17 years. As a search engine, it makes absolutely no sense.
I was surprised, however, that Bing claims to have 330 results for site:lucire.com today, up from 10. It’s still a tenth of what Mojeek has, and a twentieth of what Google has. But it is an improvement. Maybe the worst is over?
It’s still useless as a general search though, and even more useless as an internal search. The fact that popular pages are excluded and 17-year-old ones aren’t means something remains very wrong with the search engine.
PS. (August 9 NZST): I spoke too soon. Bing says 330 results, but try looking beyond 50, which was what it tended to cap Lucire at.
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