Well this is a strange one. Microsoft's Bing is of course a makeover of their old MSN Live Search engine, so it surprised me in what I found when looking into how they handle an exact phrase search. It's pretty standard with all search engines that putting two or more words within quotes will result in searching for that exact phrase. It's really just a shortcut to using the 'advanced search' option offered by many search engines. I learned that it only fails when searching for a string of exactly two words. Searching for three (or greater) works as expected. In the two word search however, Bing reports the results backwards. An 'exact phrase' search reports the results of 'Any' or 'All' of the words searched for, and visa versa. At first check, I thought they just decided to treat more than one word as an exact phrase, but if you click on the Advanced search option, then the drop down menu, it offers the following choices.
Starting with an empty search window, if you type Chinese Porcelain and select
"This exact phrase" from the drop down menu to the right, then click
the
If you type Chinese Porcelain and select 'All (or Any) of these terms' from the drop down menu, they properly put Chinese Porcelain (without quotes) in the main search window, but the search they perform is for the exact phrase, as shown below. This is confirmed by the smaller 8,790,000 results figure reported. It appears that they have their code backwards, but only for a two word search.
I tried this search with a few other two word phrases and it looks like they are consistent in doing this. I bet this has really frustrated their audience. Google is hard to beat, that's why so many of the smaller engines use Google for their own search. And it looks like Microsoft has something worked out with Wikipedia, since they offer 3 tabs for searching, Web, Wikipedia, and Images. This just adds to the already inflated, incorrect, results being returned. I wish I'd looked into this sooner. I'm sure it's caused a few headaches. I'll let them know, not sure if they will respond. It's been this way for going on 2 years now. But for now at least, it's solved the confusing results reflected on my Porcelain Search Tips comparison table. JP |
button ,
it will put "Chinese Porcelain" properly (within quotes) in the main search
window. But the search it performs is for the 'All or Any
of these terms' option, as shown below by the extremely high 24,900,000
results returned.
