Topic: Search engines – Ctrl blog

Bing stops accepting Sitemap pings, switch to IndexNow instead

2021-12-29T01:27:00Z

The Microsoft Bing search engine has quietly stopped accepting XML Sitemap pings over the holiday break. XML Sitemaps are a structured data format that contains a list of a website’s primary pages. Websites can proactively ping search engines when they publish changes to request that the search engine come and index their new pages.

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome

2021-07-07T14:06:00Z

Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it’s the default search engine and that’s a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively.

How to stop Bing ranking XML feeds over your webpages

2021-05-17T17:03:00Z

For the last two years, Bing has ranked many of my syndication feeds ("RSS") higher than the webpage counterparts. Syndication feeds are machine-readable documents people use to get blog updates with a special program. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out why Bing does this, and I’ve finally found an answer.

Yahoo!, AOL, OneSearch biased in favor of parent company’s websites

2020-03-06T00:26:00Z

Verizon Media, formerly Oath, owns the two search engines Yahoo! and AOL. Three months ago, it also launched another search engine called OneSearch. OneSearch promises to provide “unfiltered” and “unbiased” search results on its front page.

Use different search providers for every search with RandSearch

2020-01-02T18:07:00Z

I’ve built a small search utility to help people explore different search providers. RandSearch (“random search”) forwards your search queries to a randomly chosen search provider. You get different perspectives, ideas, and results with every search!