|
 Microsoft is famous for
its widely-used but buggy computer operating system. This keeps Microsoft for being famous for its buggy search engine.
During the summer of 2004, Microsoft launched a shockingly bad, pre-alpha search engine. For nearly two years following that,
the results improved virtually not at all. During the summer of 2006, MSN search improved from appalling to merely very poor.
By the spring of 2007, the Microsoft results had improved to the point that they probably surpassed Yahoo in terms of quality. They
still had a long way to go though... even in name. The Microsoft engine morphed from MSN Search, to Live Search, to Bing.com.
It wasn't until the end of 2009 that that Bing's results became competitive with Google's when they finally learned how to handle 301
redirects. Previously instead of following a redirect and indexing the new location, Microsoft would instead index the
the server error page. The worst part of this
phenomenon though was they not only cached the error page, but in many cases they discarded the REAL page, saving the error page as
the content of the URL.
This was as incompetent as a search engine can be, after they figured it all out, their results improved dramatically due to the
reintroduction of millions of quality pages that happened to have been 301ed at some point. |