This Website Can Now Be Found via Bing
After a decade of unsuccessfully trying (and trying to understand) to get my website to appear on DuckDuckGo (which is using Bing search results), I had given up on both Microsoft and DuckDuckGo.
Two days ago, I read a blog post by Jeff Johnson, who had to deal with this issue repeatedly.
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bing2.html
He’s not alone in this, as searching the web (via Google) can attest to. There’s something deeply broken with Bing. Support is unresponsive and if you do get a reply at all, it’s generic boilerplate, reciting their FAQ pages.
Then, after an update to the above post, Jeff writes that his business site is now visible on DuckDuckGo again. This prompted me to search for my own site, expecting nothing. To my astonishment, it’s now indexed and visible. No shadow-banning any more.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aherrbischoff.com
This applies to Bing itself as well.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aherrbischoff.com
Finally, some good news. Trusting Microsoft is off the table now. Trusting DuckDuckGo can only ever go as far as trusting the tech they rely on, which is Microsoft. It’s a shame to gamble away so much user goodwill on an unreliable partner.
DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008. My site went online in 2013. It’s been a short ten years since then.
Update: Despite some posts being indexed now, the post which is the #1 Google search result for the terms “advids spam” is still not listed.
Compare:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aherrbischoff.com+advids
With this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aherrbischoff.com+advids
At this point I have to assume the professional spam outfit Advids is successfully effecting the suppression of the Bing search results. I didn’t think I would ever write this, but Google actually appears to be the more transparent search engine with less arbitrary censorship.