Playing with Search Engines Part 1 = Bing
Playing with Search engines.
As most of you know I spend virtually all of my working day testing search engines. I thought that today I would take a small look one of the new big kids on the block Bing which is the new search engine from Microsoft.
As I’m a Test Manager I won’t be be comparing basic searches but I’ll be looking for weird results and also looking for possible defects.
One of the great things about Bing is that it’s very similar to Google in that they share the same search structure, so if I type into Bing that I want to look for The Test Manager the URL will look a little something like http://www.bing.com/search?q=The+Test+Manager.com&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n . Now if I want the exact same search in google all I need to do is to change the domain name from bing.com to google.com keeping the rest of the URL so the query now reads. http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Test+Manager.com&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n .
So lets start looking for interesting data.
First thing I think we’ll so its to look at the special character handling.
URL 1 = Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Reference #7.d6b23554.1246449926.0
not the cleanest of failure messages.
I should in the interests of fairness state that Bing can handle search phrases up to 2250 characters long and fails nicely. However if the string is a bit longer you get the ugly fail error. My string was alot longer
Enough fun stressing the servers, now lets look at business logic
How do they handle real search data.
we will search for URL:// meaning URL’s that start with // this should in theory bring back no results as its an invalid scheme.
URL2 = Strange results in Bing This is a strange one as if you attempt to click the link you get told
“Let’s try that again -That web page doesn’t exist”
however if you use Bing Cache you can see the page does exist. The bing Bots take //:www. and add in the http scheme when browsing however the site code does not.
Another problem with this URL is that it when trying to copy it, it may contain a bolded double witdh space which is invisible to the most. A real pain as it means that it will fail with a host not found.
A similar thing happens if you search for ww. (We can have valid 2 w’s as they are subdomain’s, however most search engines have issues with unexpected results. its just one of those things that search engine testers know to look out for)
URL3 = Another Random Bing result.
Ok so enough picking on Bing next time around it will be Googles turn.
I really like Bing as a search engine and I think its a good starting point. Once its matured a bit then I’m sure it will grow and sort out these little niggles.