Last Friday, a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle knocked out a number of popular websites, including Microsoft Bing’s recently launched Travel portal. The site was back up by Saturday afternoon, but not before Google caught the site’s placeholder “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” page and added it to its index (you can see the cached page here).
Now, five days later, “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” is the second search result offered when you search Google for “Bing”. It doesn’t take much to picture Google CEO Eric Schmidt cackling with glee over this.
This would be amusing enough on its own — It’s been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while I’m sure Google’s automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, it’s strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Google’s, but it’s no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.
But it gets even better: Bing’s Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Google’s, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.
This might seem like a trivial goof on Google’s part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browser’s integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for “bing” on Google every day.
they forgot to hashtag that tweet:
#ohsnap
Stats page for the war of 2009: Google vs. Bing
http://viralhea...2/bing%20google
I have a little chuckle at the thought microsoft employees use google to view the bing website.
It’s only four letters guys, you can just enter it straight into the browser…
MS guys are obviously watching Google at all times. Just as Google is watching them.
I myself can’t find the cached version of the page. Is Bing gaining popularity and being pushed around by Google?!
Hilarious. I’m curious to know what the rest of the execs at Microsoft thought after seeing that tweet from their social media coordinator. LOL.
@Google didnt revert back publicly but seems like the search results are updated!
No it is not! not at this time, where I am.
yes i think it should update it frequently and yes they both eyes are on each other like a tough competitor. where will Yahoo go then ?
i heard Googlers are working on a secret project as to improve Google search engine in front of this Bing and other tough competitors.
I like Google updates with lots of Big surprises
It’s still there right now. Just checked.
Why is this even on the front page of techcrunch? The the huge number of pages google has indexed I’m not surprised it hasn’t updated.
Come on, it’s pretty funny.
It is funny. Disregard the dinosaur. He knows not what he speaks. Front Page?
They shouldn’t have changed title to “unavailable”, title is imp for SEO. A bing mistake.
Google has a bug in its index where it shows copy from our company’s buypage from about 8 years ago, mentioning a product that we discontinued about 5 years ago. There’s definitely some ghost-in-the-machine stuff going on at the GooglePlex :p
Doktor Freud explains that the GooglePlex is something that all teenager survive at some point in their lives!
Aaronontheweb, what’s the url that looks old? I’d be curious to find out more.
@Cutts, why don’t you start by telling whoever is responsible for correcting this to do his job.
It’s still showing “…Unavailable” from where i am.
Matt, a website of mine sees this bug too. My site used to have a /register.php page till some 8 months ago. I still get traffic to people clicking on that link on Google.
Matt,
here is the URL
http://www.smartdraw.com/buy/
If you search for “buy SmartDraw” in Google you get the following Title text for that URL:
Purchase SmartDraw Professional Plus at 15% off
We eliminated the 3 versions and rolled everything into a single product 4-5 years ago. Our current meta-data for the page listed at that URL reflects that change and has for some time, so we were pretty mystified when one of our old products resurfaced in the web page title in the #1 result for “buy SmartDraw”
Ah, that’s easy, because it’s not us having a stale crawl. Check http://www.smar....com/robots.txt and it looks like the site blocks /buy/ . That means that we can’t crawl the page. Since we can’t crawl it, we’re doing our best to return something useful despite being blocked. If you want us to show better snippets, just change your robots.txt to let us in. :)
Thank you for the clarification. Our webmaster should not have slated the ENTIRE /buy/ folder under there, only the transactional pages. I’ll go have them fix that.
I guess I also need to ask the webdev team why they didn’t bother looking at robots.txt when I asked them to look into this issue. That might have been a good place for them to start.
LOL …. yeah the Bing team must be enjoying poking fun at Goog on twitter :)
who thought that the enginers at MSFT had a sense of humor?
It is Hilarious, and worth posting. I got a HUGE kick out of this. Please lets not take everything too seriously.
Well, Google can respond: Google Advertisement NEVER “Temporarily Unavailable”!
Except, y’know, for when it is. Like Gmail. Google Maps. Google Apps. Google Voice. Gtalk. Google Finance. Google Health…
Every company has outages, even Google.
You are kidding right? You must not have a gmail or apps account. Either that or you are a poor “Observer”.
my gmail has been hiccuping the past several days
I was watching an interview with Eric Schmidt last night on the News Hour with Jim Leher, and when the interviewer brought up two recent Google outages, Schmidt looked like somebody had taken a huge shit right in front of him.
Every company has outages, but since Google likes to maintain the image of being a group of Stanford-educated infallible geniuses, any reported outage makes them cringe. It is a bit odd that they would draw attention to a Bing outage while they still have plenty of egg on their faces.
Because MS asked them.
Mike says in an interview with that antitrust lawyer that once a week a Microsoft PR person visits TechCrunch and they discuss stuff. I guess they’re discussing how to write more MS friendly stories.
REALLY,
with all that google ads on techcrunch.com!
PLEASE!
Gooentologist go crazy if Guubar is not the GOD?
I’d have to agree with that. Hardly a tech crunch…
I bet Bing business model is build on organic search engine referrals from Google. Next up: adsense ads on Bing.
Google does advertise on Bing, and Microsoft advertises on Google.
i retweeted Bing’s tweet minutes after seeing it, I found it hilarious
Actually! Bing is so desperate.. they do not want to lose out on any google juice :P
The battle for real-time indexing has begun.
It’s called “hazing” haha. Pretty funny actually.
I don’t think http://www.bing.com/* is crawled very often by Google bots and that would be normal since it does not serve “live” indexable content… Unlike TechCrunch.com for example which must be crawled very often like any other news source.
Hey, I know this isn’t the right place to post this, but I was wondering how you could get hired at techcrunch or even if they would hire. I was also wondering how I could possibly contact somebody from the techcrunch team (i.e. Michael Arrington).
Try posting your resume here and we’ll do an impromptu interview right here. We are waiting for your post.
Wow man, not trying to rain on your parade or anything but Arrington’s name is on probably dozens of social networking sites, twitter, his email is also probably not a secret.
I mean, if you can’t find a way to contact him, you probably won’t be able to get a job at TechCrunch.
Ha, I know I found all that stuff a while back, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured he would have hundreds of twitter replies and facebook messages, what better to do than just ask on the blog? Well I will try other forms of contacting him.
Make a few blog posts that are so interesting that you attract Arrington’s attention?-
another reason why i use bing over google
Dude! How is this supposed to be reason?
That is funny. I can see the google guys leaving it there it on purpose for a laugh.
If that’s true, it raises even more questions about the integrity of Google and their results. What else would they be doing that with? I seriously doubt they did this on purpose…heaven help us if they did.
BTW, it was ONLY Bing travel that was down…Bing search was not down. And for those that mentioned that Google never has outages…you must not use it much. Everyone has outages…I’ve lost Google services several times for hours.
Bill, we recrawled and the snippet is already fixed.
Matt, actually as of now when you search for “Bing” on Google the snippet still reads “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” on the 2nd listing. It’s not fixed.
Not fixed for me…probably still propagating.
Not fixed for me too!!!
still not fixed here
Still the same as of friday july 10 13:34:45 IST
http://www.goog...lient=firefox-a
#
Bing
Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.
http://www.bing.com/ – Cached – Similar
#
Bing Temporarily Unavailable
A blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there has …
http://www.bing.com/travel – Cached – Similar
More results from http://www.bing.com »
Welcome
BING represents the rigid polyurethane insulation industry in Europe. It develops one voice messages across Europe on technical, safety, …
http://www.bing.org/ – Cached – Similar
I HOPE BING.ORG SUES BING.COM for trademark infringement… ;)
Matt,
Isn’t this bing travel’s own damn fault for not returning a 503 status code when they were down?
So many sites do this wrong, returning a 200 when they are shunted / in maintenance mode…
First of all, Bing should bring things in shape by properly indexing all websites that are already indexed on google… for instance run a google for digitizor you will see plenty of relevant results, now do bing search for digitizor .. not even one single relevant result on the front page! #strange :P
every time I read one of these complaints, I run the search using bing-vs-google.com .(My favorite search site right now).
After telling bing that I did not misspell digitizor, by clicking” Results are included for digitizer. Show just the results for digitizor.” at the top, I get plenty of relevant results.
Bing assumes a misspelling and includes links for both, Google asks if you meant to spell it that way. Just a different way of looking at things.
Interesting choices. The bing way is optimal if your searches often contain typos since you won’t have to click an extra link to see the typo correction. But the google way works best if you tend to know exactly what word you want. For my searches the google way would be best. But there are so many illiterate people misspelling search terms that bing may have the better default. If bing would let me change that setting for myself, I’d be fine.
The best part of that is that Bing is using Seesmic Desktop. Yay!
Google is going down
This was funny but I really thought Microsoft tweeted to google: “Try Updating Your Index Once in A While” as the title implies. What if Microsoft didn’t want to come off like that? Just seems to make something out of nothing if you ask me. Regardless, that was kind of funny.
LOL!
Bing is GREAT! :-) that was funny!
Let’s hope that the “do not evil” CORPORATION has some sense of humors! Since they are so nervous about only 8% drop of market share! Was that enough to make an enlightened “jedi” corporation a little bit darker?
8% drop??? I think I missed that.
Can you provide a link?
Haha, I like it.
What’s funny to me is the way the 2 companies are communicating.. through Twitter. Quite informal and worth a laugh.
i like bing posts on TC. they make my day. i bing myself and my wife when i see them.
They probably left it like that on purpose. I’m surprised it took the Bing guys this long to notice it. Now who’s the joke on? :P
It would not have made sense if they wrote the message 30 sec after Bing Travel came back live.
Part of the joke is that days later, Google still didn’t update it’s index.
It seems like Bing is at fault for allowing google to index a “site down” page. I’m surprised you didn’t point that out.
It is incredible! hahahah
straight up hilarious
Bing Travel was actually down for me today…around 3pm…so maybe Google is actually current?
That’s funny! But then I’ve noticed that Google does that quite often to pages that have been temporary down, but are up and running again. Btw, found a typo: “Google caught the the site’s placeholder”.
you guys just now figuring out that google isn’t the best search technology on earth and after they won the market they don’t even have to try anymore to make money?
Look forward to Bing. But I still like to use google, fast and efficient. Anyway, we, the internet browsers are so fortunate to have these 2 big search engines. There are so many others search engines though.
Looks like it’s already fine when I search for bing.com/travel on Google. I see “Search multiple travel sites, compare airline & hotel prices, find travel deals, and receive free fare predictions on Bing Travel.” in the snippet.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an issue if Bing’s travel site stayed up. ;) Was it really down for 36 hours? http://www.tech...r_49935637.html
This issue was reported by BingWatch on July 7 ‘09, 7:22 morning. See:
http://bing.typ...navailable.html
Or see on http://twitter.com/bingwatch
(@mattcutts) It’s really hilarious to see Googlers so prickly and defensive. Keep up the vaguely irritated and superior tone, it only adds to how Bing! makes the Softies’ day.
Simple Tom, sorry if I came across as defensive. We happened to crawl during the time period when Bing Travel was down. That can happen, but the snippet is fine now.
Matt, the snippet is still showing “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” as the indented second result when searching for just [bing]
Here’s what I see when I search for the url, Mike: http://www.matt...vel-snippet.png . I’m seeing a crawl time of Jul 9, 2009 19:34:53 GMT. So I’m guessing that you might be hitting a different data center that’s still getting the data, but we have crawled it recently.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for jumping on this issue. :) I am suspecting you are putting “bing travel” in as a query for your png but the query in question is just “bing.”
FWIW, the “bing temporarily available” in 2nd position I am seeing right now is when I put “bing” into the search box.
Hope that helps,
Betsy Aoki, bing
This is what i see from Google.ca
http://johny.org/bing.png
Then you ought to be testing better. Here from nl it also shows the old snippet. Not that I could care less :)
Matt, if you search for “bing travel” you get a good snippet, but if you search for “bing” and look at the nested result you get the “down” snippet.
Matt if you search for ‘Bing’ using Google, you will still see the ‘Bing Temporarily Unavailable’ result.
Now why would you give us a snapshot of “Bing Travel”. When the article clearly says “Bing”?
& why didn’t you include the search textbox in your screenshot to show us what you searched for. taking us for idiots…
Now fix the thing already
I don’t know why everyone is knocking Bing.com. I think Bing in a matter of a few years is going to become a major force in the search world. it’s a nice product. I think Bing!
In fact,maybe operators will find the new business model in future early than internet companies.
see below:
http://telecomp...st-distributor/
As opposed to searching for bing travel on bing and not ever seeing it was down?
I think it might be time for Google to, dare I say, start advertising their differentiation to Bing? I see Bing ads everywhere now.
Cool find. I agree, Google should update its index much more often.
Wow, what BlogReader points out is true, you get better results for query “bing” in Google than in bing itself :)
anyone else notice the (perhaps telling) irony of users googling ‘bing’ to get to bing in the first place?
Anyone know the origin of the ‘Bing’ name?
What time did u post this? It’s still the same :)
Nice shot Bing
It’s called 503 Service Unavailable.
(P.S. Bing you did it wrong!)
I Love it!
Google + Bing SERP = Desperate! Nuff said?
I like this very much!
Gooentologists going crazy on NY times tech reporter who said Bing is BETTER than google!
advantage, Bing!
Typical Google! They always try to follow this type of dirty marketing tactics. Game over!
I know the horrors of Google’s failure to re-index far too well. When you start a business, especially one with a unique name, you reasonably expect that with any number of reasonable clicks it would show up to the top of Google’s list. No such luck.
Bing on the other hand, had my Company’s main page as the top result on the day Bing launched. Very impressive. I’m sticking with Bing.
Maybe Monday’s M$ rumored announcement is a Google Voice competitor — Just like with BING, they’ll call it RING.
The Force is strong with this one.
indeed!
The fact that google shows dated search results and allows you to view the cache of such results can be very useful.
With that said, the results Google is caching in this case appear to be from July 4, so I can only conclude that their indexing bot does not live by the corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” and is conspiring to rid the world of bing.
This is getting fun! Google back to Bing: “[Sarcastic Clap] Nice try. Your attempts at market share are amusing…” http://bit.ly/sclap
Did any one checked if this is the case in all of Google’s data centers ?
If it would be the case, it will the first time Google’s results are synced and by that i could assume it was done manually
I just did a search for Bing using Google and, yes, the second result still says “Bing temporarily unavailable”. This was true for me at 11:30 p.m. July 9, Pacific Time.
Well i just tried it again..and now it seems like it has been fixed.