Is Microsoft Bing Trying To Kill Open Office?

Submitted by Swapnil Bhartiya on March 29, 2010 - 05:19

Microsoft Bing has many flaws, but this one seems to be the most outrageous one. If you try to search for OpenOffice on Bing, it will not show you the actual OpenOffice.org website but will show pages from random websites like OpenOffice.com or other non-OpenOffice.org websites.

On the other hand, Google search shows OpenOffice.org as the first search result. Bing has gone to such an extent that in fact, you will not find the OpenOffice website even on the 5th page. So a Bing surfer will never land on the OpenOffice.org website.

The reason for this flaw is unclear: is Microsoft sending OpenOffice enthusiasts to wrong websites to discourage them from installing and downloading the software, or it is an algorithmic flaw? Only Microsoft can answer.

Microsoft has put Bing as a default search engine on its Internet Explorer and it takes couple of steps for a user to change it to Google. On the other hand, Open Source Firefox or Google's Chrome allows you to choose your desired search engine with a single click.

Try searching OpenOffice on Bing and tell us what results you get...

UPDATE: A representative from Microsoft Bing team informed Katonda about this issue. Below is the response:

"We’ve learned that OpenOffice.org is not showing up in Bing search results because OpenOffice.org is preventing the Bing crawler from indexing their site. We’re reaching out to them now to try and resolve the issue."

We will keep you posted with the development.