Kogan’s recent IE7 tax was a cheeky way for the online retailer to promote itself, as well as a reminder that many people are still using seriously-out-of-date browsers. Has Microsoft now retaliated by removing the main Kogan site from Bing search results?
A post on Kogan’s site notes that searching for Kogan.com on Bing produces links Kogan’s Facebook and Twitter pages as well as news stories and the Wikipedia article about the company, but doesn’t actually ever link to the front page of the Kogan.com site. The same effect was evident when I searched simply for ‘Kogan’ or for ‘Kogan.com.au’ on Bing, while Google produces a link to Kogan’s online store as the top result, as you can see above. As Kogan’s post points out, Bing is also used to power Yahoo! search results, though both are still minnows compared to Google’s dominance of the search market.
I’m a great believer in the theory that you should never assume malice when incompetence could also be an equally valid explanation for a problem. Given Bing’s patchy record, it’s possible that the search engine has never actually produced the “obvious” result when searching for Kogan or Kogan.com. In other words, its results may have been poor for a long time, not just since Kogan’s stunt.
That said, it does seem odd for the main Kogan site not to appear anywhere at all in the first page of Bing’s results, whether you search for Kogan, kogan.com and kogan.com.au.
Kogan.com mysteriously disappears from Microsoft Search Engines [Kogan]
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