While working on the redirection of articles from Builder AU to our new home here at TechRepublic, we needed to do some searching to find out where some of our articles original homes were.

The article in question in this piece is this one, which was replicated on our sister ZDNet Australia site.

Let’s check Google:

Everything is in order and as it should be.

As a bit of a test, I wanted to see what Bing would return. This is the result:

That’s not the best, I’ll follow its advice and use the plus notation:

If I went to the top link, I could find the story, but this is meant to be a search engine and it should be returning the article whose title is “Microsoft dallies with open source”.

In one last vain attempt I decided to use quotes around the title, maybe that would work:

No luck there either. In fact, the second and third links point to an article, but it is the wrong one!

Firefox is offering a build with Bing as the default search engine, but after this experience (and many other related queries) I wouldn’t want to use it.

The frustration stems from the fact that even when using quotes and plus notation, Bing could not find the primary source yet Google found it first go.

As a test, let’s come back in a month or so and see if Bing can find the quote in this article.