Whereby we publicly thank the search engine Bing and most of all, our readers

by Kay B. Day

This month Bing moved into the top spot as our number one referrer among search engines, sending more than 30 percent of our unique visitors who come here via a search. Our top referrer is actually you, the reader. Those of you who share our articles on social media, who email our links to your friends and who come directly to our URL are our bread and butter, modest though it may be. So along with thanking Bing we also thank you big time. This, however, won't be a column of unqualified praise for any search engine.

Screen capture of Bing Oct. 3, 2009.One of my favorite 'Bingisms' is the unique photo on the page each day. Shown here, Rio, triumphant over winning the Olympic bid, a first ever victory for a South American country.

I wrote about Bing and other search engines in my regular Web Savvy column at The Writer. Because our articles are research-intense, we never rely on a single search engine. I’ve found nuggets through Bing that didn’t show up on Google. Same goes for search engines like Dogpile.

If you’re a conservative writer, you already know you will experience a double challenge when it comes to the search engines, any of them. An example based on a simple experiment—I put the word ‘healthcare’ into a search bar, using the ‘Blogs’ tab. Google returns a neoliberal blog at the top of the heap—a blog written by someone living abroad. I did a second search using Google and the results came back the same, only this time the second spot went to the high profile neolib Huffington Post, a blog directory largely reliant on volunteers.

Doing a ‘healthcare’ search in Bing I add ‘+ blogs’ so we get uniformity. Returns included a neoliberal healthcare blog followed by another neolib healthcare blog.

Do any search on any political topic and you will most often get neolib blogs returned first. Algorithms aside, it’s obvious search engines, all of them, are drawn to neolibs like a magnet to a needle. So what I’m getting at here is that most search engines march in lockstep. And it’s no secret media and major web employees at major tech leaders like Google and Yahoo favored President Barack Obama during the 2008 campaigns. It’s also no major secret I haven’t a problem with companies favoring a political party in terms of donations or support—that’s the American way.

But I also favor a product user knowing exactly what he’s getting when he opts to use a product, even if it’s free.

And bear in mind I'm expressing a personal opinion based on my own experience. No statistical study results are claimed herein.

So if you want to read conservative websites, add the term ‘+conservative’ to your searches, but more importantly, talk to other conservatives. Share conservative links. Reference conservative blogs.
There is one major difference I’ve found with Bing—it is far easier to utilize the webmaster tools than it is to use Google’s tools. Some of the ‘help’ tutorials with Google are laughable—they sound as though they were written by a member of Congress because the language is so complicated. I’ve told readers I basically gave up on trying to figure Google out a long time ago—the rankings seem to ignore a number of major links to our site.

On the other hand, it took me less than half an hour to ‘Bingerize’ my website and I immediately saw search results. When I looked at my stats this morning, I was astounded to see Bing returning more than 10 percent over Google.

Various tech blogs noted Bing slipped in market share during September. Any search engine going up against Google has its work cut out because Google is a household word, even a verb now, and the company offers affiliate ads (you can earn pennies by placing ads on your website; if you have millions of visitors you probably earn a lot more, though) as well as a number of other tools.

But Bing has a daily photo that brings the user amazing images from around the world. The home page also notes popular topics and has a sidebar where you can explore by category. My suggestion would be to add a ‘blogs’ tab to that front page, even if the top returns will be neoliberal sites. Obviously readers do scroll down. Otherwise we would receive no search engine referrals.

My other suggestion is one I’ve made before—conservatives need a search engine of our own. That isn’t likely to happen but until it does we will see the same neolib dominance on the Web that we see in old branded media.

Bing has a lot of promise and hopefully some sort of affiliate ad program will be developed in time.

There’s a lot of market share in the conservative sphere—consider the conservative dominance in talk radio the Democrats in Congress would love to knock down with a back door to the Fairness Doctrine. That conservative sector would certainly support any search engine giving us a fair shake.

We must thank Bing, though, for at least indexing enough of our pages to send us a large share of our general Web traffic. And as we often say, above all, we must thank our readers who send us new visitors every day. You are the honey in our green tea with lemon.

As for sites like New Media Journal and Free Republic, you are the cookie alongside that tea. We also rely on Newstex, master content syndicator, for placing our content with large media outlets and paying us a modest royalty in return.

Therefore, reader, try Bing. Try Dogpile. Go outside your comfort zone. It’ll be worth your while and will help (somewhat) level the playing field among the search engines. Remember: SCROLL DOWN, at least midway the first search results page. And above all, help promote conservative websites. And if you're a conservative blogger, use the Bing webmaster tools. I promise you it won't take much time and you should see increased traffic. Thus far, however, what works best for us is branding ourselves offline to bring readers online.

[We receive no reward whatsoever by writing about specific products.]