Like many people, I use Google as my home page on my web browser (I use Firefox primarily). Recently I decided to switch to Bing from Microsoft for a few weeks to see if I could work with it as my main Internet search engine, and have found the experience enjoyable enough that I might make the switch permanent. I especially enjoy the photography on the homepage with rotates daily.

My main motivator however for looking at alternates to Google came from recent experiences arising out of the re-design of my home site. As part of the re-design, I changed the URLs of all of the articles and news entries on my home site to be, perhaps ironically, more search-engine friendly.

To help the search engines to migrate to the new URLs, I put 301 re-directs in place and also submitted a sitemap XML file to Google. Despite all of this, it has taken Google months to re-index my site, and it is still serving up the old URLs for my content despite the 301 responses from my server re-directing its robot to the new URLs.

Worse than this, Google is not displaying the correct titles for my pages.

If you compare the "site:techleader.pro" query for my site on Google vs. Bing, the differences are stark:

Google - site:techleader.pro

Bing - site:techleader.pro

On Bing the page titles are all correct, and only the new URLs for my site are returned. Furthermore, as I have never actually submitted a sitemap to Bing or even the top-level domain name, this is an impressive spidering result! My only complaint about Bing is that it is currently only returning about 75 pages for my site, as the site in fact has almost 300 pages, but at least the results are accurate.

Google worries me a little now, as I am wondering if it is taking so long for it to update it's indexes for my site, how many others sites on the Internet are currently suffering from the same fate? With this in mind, as a searcher, am I now getting outdated results from Google?

---

Updated 2021 : note that the above post was originally published in 2010, but is left here for archival purposes. I wrote this out of frustration with how badly Google Search was working, and over ten years later I still feel the same way: Internet search is ripe for disruption.