Webupon

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you do when trying a search engine for the first time is look to see if it can find something you’ve created and put on the Web. Your first search query might be the name of your blog or the title of an article you’ve written or it might even be your name. Ideally, the search engine will have indexed all your work and made it easily accessible for all of its searchers to access. Often, however, this isn’t the case.  Instead, you may find that, as far as the search engine is concerned, you are a total unknown; it doesn’t even know that you exist and no one who searches using that search engine will find out, either.  Microsoft’s newly rebranded and relaunched search engine, Bing, has given many a writer, blogger, and webmaster this deflating experience since the site was launched on June 3, 2009. While your first reaction to search engine anonymity might understandably be anger and annoyance, there is reason to believe that Bing is just experiencing some growing pains and will soon do a better job of indexing the entire Web — even those parts of it written by obscure characters like you and me.

The main reason I’m so hopeful about the future of Bing is because I still remember which search engine it was that listed my second blog before any other. It wasn’t Google, that undisputed king of search engines. It wasn’t Yahoo!, the second most popular search engine in the United States. It also wasn’t one of the smaller search engines like Gigablast. Instead, it was Windows Live Search that first dared to explore and index my site and allow its users to find my posts. Two years later, the tables have turned: searchers on Google and Yahoo! can still find my blog, but those who use Bing, the successor to Windows Live Search, cannot at the moment.  Many other people have similar experiences to share. However, I believe this is just a passing phase. We must remember that Bing was launched very recently and it is still evolving and being tweaked. Microsoft’s first priority is to provide most searchers with the best experience they can get. While Bing’s currently smaller index will disappoint those seeking more obscure content, it has pleased many conducting the more popular search queries. Ultimately, Microsoft will surely make its index more comprehensive so that it may offer something for everyone — after all, Bing is hurt every time a searcher cannot find what he or she is looking for and goes somewhere else to conduct the same search. 

While I am hopeful that the problem of Bing not indexing many sites will resolve itself over time, I don’t recommend that you just sit back and wait for Bing to find you. You can make the job of search engines much easier by making it easy for your work to be found. Perhaps the best way to do that is to make sure there are links to your work scattered about the Web. If you are proud of your work, don’t be afraid to share it with the world — link to it from your social networking profiles, from your blogs or journals, from articles you’ve written, and from other appropriate online hubs that you have control over. That blog of mine that I mentioned in the last paragraph happens to not have many incoming links, and I definitely think that’s one reason Bing isn’t listing it at the moment. Sharing your work tends to have a cacading effect for not only can search engines find your content through these links that you create, but also other people will discover your work and start linking to it on their own. Alternatively, if you prefer to take a more direct approach, you could try submitting your site directly to Bing. Presumably this will work, but it has tended to be a slow process during Bing’s early existence in my experience. Most experts I’m familiar with recommend link building as opposed to direct submissions because a site that is linked to is more likely to be notable than one that isn’t and will often be ranked higher in a search engine. After all, getting indexed by Bing is just half the battle — the higher you are listed in the search results, the more visitors you are apt to receive.          

Whatever you do, don’t ignore Bing! Due to a recent agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo!, Bing will be the brains behind Yahoo! Search before long. This means that Bing will be THE Google competitor as it will power both the #2 and the #3 most popular search engines. Microsoft has a unique opportunity to give Google a run for its money; the extensive advertising campaign for Bing has shown just how serious Microsoft is about search. Competitors in other sectors can attest to the fact that Microsoft can be a very difficult opponent when it is focused. While I can’t see Bing overtaking Google any time soon due in large part to the fact that Bing isn’t yet comprehensive enough to challenge the big G, it would be folly to ignore the search engine such a large minority of Internet users are or will be using regularly in the future. While it may take a little effort to get into Bing’s index, it’s well worth the trouble.