More of Bing’s follies (they just keep coming)

I see WorldWideWebSize.com has wised up and figured out Bing was having them on about the number of results it had for their search terms.
 

 

When Bing says it has 300-odd results for the site:lucire.com yet doesn’t actually go beyond a limit of around 50 (where it has been stuck for many months), I was actually being generous. I never deducted the repeated results on the pages that it did show.

Here’s a case in point: an ego search for my own name. These are the first four pages. I realize I have the graphics a bit small, but you should be able to make out just how many pages have been repeated here. A regular search engine like Mojeek and Google show you different results on each page. Bing doesn’t.
 




 

More strange happenings: you’ll recall I noted that pages we haven’t linked to since the 2000s were up top in a site search on Bing for lucire.com. The very top one was lp.html, a frameset (yes, it’s that old). I did what I thought would be logical in such a circumstance: I pointed one of the frames to the current 2022 page (which is still regular HTML, but with Bootstrap).

Result in Bing: it’s vanished.

Did the same to news.html, not linked to since 2012.

Vanished.
 

 

The current news page is Wordpress, but Bing still manages to index the occasional Wordpress page on our site. The fact it’s PHP shouldn’t make a difference.

These pages are just too new for Bing, which is really Microsoft’s own Wayback Machine. And Duck Duck Go’s, and Qwant’s, and a whole manner of search engines’.
 
Meanwhile at Brave: it does have an independent spider but admits to using the Bing API for the image search, as does Mojeek. But what Brave doesn’t say is that it also taps in to Bing for site: searches, rendering them largely useless, too. Brave does a far better job than Bing in its regular search though, picking up lucire.com for Lucire as well as some major index pages.
 

On a regular search, Brave does rather well—it’s picked up the top pages.
 


Bing and Brave compared, using site:lucire.com. Brave isn’t as independent as you might think with site: and image searches. These screenshots were taken on Sunday.
 

Still well short of Mojeek in terms of its index—but then so is everyone aside from Google.

The saga continues, with still no one talking about Bing’s collapse (though I know of one journalist working away behind the scenes).


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