Good old nutshell version of said 'Blah'

Just my thoughts.

I can't say I entirely agree with the focus of your comment here. Yes, someone does say "Bing is crap", but actually no one says "Bing is shit". In my post I did say that multimap was immensely shit, and, when I wrote this post nearly 2 years ago it really was the case. Multimap came nowhere close to the user-friendliness of Google Maps, or for that matter Live Maps.

Amyway, I think it's a little unfair to suggest that the commenters are just trying to come up with as many variations on a theme of defecation as possible – if they were, then linguistically they failed.

The main commenting theme here was that, from an indexing point of view, Bing wasn't cutting it. I didn't investigate that end of things extensively, so I can't state whether that was the case or not.

As far as my original post was concerned, my main point throughout was an observation of how poorly the branding had been managed between successive attempts to consolidate services and bring everything together, as well as re-factor old brands – eg Live.

I think Bing has come a long way in the near two years since it was launched and it's infinitely important to see competition in the search space. Microsoft are going to keep pushing at it and that's great. I'd love to see more players in the space who have a realistic chance of gaining some market share.

That said, Microsoft, in my eyes, are still having difficulty with the branding end of things, but they're slowly getting there. Bing services nearly all maintain a bing.com domain (barring "Shopping" which still takes you off to ciao.co.uk). The Live/Bing product offerings have better delineation too – although I still think succumbing to user feedback and calling their webmail service "Windows Live Hotmail" was a branding mistake.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that, ignoring the fanbois, a lot of people would be quite happy to see strong competitors emerge in the search engine space, and whilst general ranting of 'This is shit' falls well short of constructive criticism, I see some people here stating genuine concerns about issues with indexing. I imagine a lot of these issues are cleared up now, and that's definitely for the greater good.

I still don't think much of the name "Bing" though

In other words, all you wasters, shut up and get on with it

Every website I create get's instantly indexed in both Google and Yahoo, yet never gets indexed in Bing until I shout and scream in their community forums and Brett Yount manually adds it!

How do they expect to be successful with this type of activity… And all the forum experts say "focus on building quality backlinks" – bullshit! I'm not asking to be number one…I'm asking to be indexed… a process that Yahoo and Google have no problem doing…I will focus on backlinks in my efforts to be at the top of the SERPs but that is secondary to just being listed!

Think about it, a small business owner who is focussing energy on a website (growing numbers of businesses focussing efforts online)…
I have a website and Bing doesn't index it…
1. I'm never going to use Bing because it won't list my site
2. I'm never going to tell anyone else to use Bing because they wont find me there

They're shooting themselves in the foot by making getting listed so difficult!

There is clearly a major issue with their index and it either can't keep up or is very buggy…

Boo Bing!

Hell, I'm a member of Technet and MS already know me.

Thats right, MS has a list of site owners but didn't even look at it when creating their search fockup.

I'm still waiting for their stupid attempt at search engine to actually VISIT MY SITE – Sept 09????

Let alone index it…..

Oh, I am number one in Google and most others SE if not front page, Bing doesn't know I EXIST??

It might be better this way.

Try again MS…

Their maps stuff has some stuff which is better than Google Maps, but yeah, I don't even know if Live Maps (or bing.com/maps) is the same thing as Multimap.

Yeah, mega confusing – and that's even for people with some web savvy!

haven't tried the bing search thing at all…. but i've quite enjoyed wandering around the birds eye view of dublin on bing maps. good coverage.. all the way out to where i live.

but yeah.. it does all seem confusing.