What the Hell Is Going on With Bing’s Search Results? ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jesse Squires, last March:

I discovered earlier this week that my website is no longer being indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. In fact, it appears that it has been deliberately removed from their search indexes. On Bing, rather than display a “no results” message, it displays a “Some results have been removed” message, which is very concerning. Notably, however, Google search is working fine.

Jeff Johnson, last June:

Yesterday I was searching with DuckDuckGo and noticed to my dismay that my business web site https://underpassapp.com was missing entirely from the search results! (My personal web site https://lapcatsoftware.com is still in DuckDuckGo, however.)

Many people don’t realize that DuckDuckGo sources its search results from Microsoft Bing. I learned this when I was looking into advertising on DuckDuckGo, and I found that they also outsource their advertising to Microsoft. It turns out that my business web site was removed from Bing, which explains why it’s missing from DuckDuckGo.

Dave Rupert in January:

It came to my attention that my site does not appear on DuckDuckGo search results. Even when searching for “daverupert.com” directly. After some digging, DuckDuckGo used to get their site index from Yandex, but now gets their site index from Bing and sure enough… I didn’t appear on Bing either.

Jack Yan in January:

And when it comes to Bing’s index collapse—or whatever you wish to call it—it’s no more pronounced than here (well, at least among the sites that even get listed). For site:techdirt.com:

Google: 54,700 results, 393 visible

Mojeek: 48,818 results, 1,000 visible

Yandex: 2,000 results, 250 visible

Gigablast: 200 results, 200 visible

Yep: 10 results, 10 visible

Baidu: 1 result, 1 visible

Bing: 1 result, 1 visible

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, in July:

This morning, however, someone alerted me to the fact that DuckDuckGo currently shows zero results for Techdirt. Not even some random old article. Zero. None. Zilch.

[…]

Bing appears to have deleted all links to Techdirt. Though at least it tells you that “some results have been removed.” Though it doesn’t say why.

Masnick again yesterday:

Either way, a few hours later DuckDuckGo added back… a single link(!) to Techdirt’s front page, which we mentioned in an update. The next day, I heard from a couple people who said they had reached out to people at Microsoft, and I was told that this sometimes happen, and that the Bing team will eventually fix it (though it might happen faster if something gets public attention). Either way, about a day after I had written about Techdirt being erased, we were back in both Bing and DuckDuckGo and I considered it a one-off bug that had been fixed.

But… it’s back. I happened to just check on Bing and saw that we’re gone again (though now there’s also a big obnoxious box trying to get me to chat):

Based on links collected by Michael Tsai, this appears to be a somewhat common issue where Bing — and, consequently, the many small search engines which rely on its results — will completely de-index a website for no apparent reason. Bing still shows zero results for a query for site:techdirt.com, though it does again say “some results have been removed” and links to a generic help page.