Wanna search for Kogan using Microsoft’s bing browser? Don’t count on it.
If you’re looking for Kogan via a search engine, I sure hope you’re not using Bing because the online retailer alleges Microsoft has omitted his store from its organic search results.
Last month, Kogan announced it would tax web browsers who used Internet Explorer 7 as it was inefficient and costly to program for. According to the CourierMail, he referred to the browser as antiquated and “long passed its use-by date.”
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Searching Kogan through Bing will generate Kogan’s Facebook and Wikipedia pages, but the official Kogan store (Kogan.com) is nowhere to be found.
Whereas only a minority of people use Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s search engine can be accessed through any browser across multiple devices.
Kogan’s founder, Ruslan Kogan, addressed the omission in a blog post and claimed he was “baffled and shocked” to learn Kogan’s main site wasn’t being generated in organic searches via Microsoft endorsed engines Bing and Yahoo.
“We never waged war against Microsoft over IE7, we simply wanted people to upgrade their web browsers – we even mentioned many times in the media how the latest versions of Internet Explorer comply with the latest web standards and are suitable browsers,” Kogan wrote.
“We hope Microsoft were not too offended by what we did with the IE7 tax and this is just a temporary glitch.”
A Microsoft spokesperson spoke to news.com.au and denied the search results were manually altered.
“The ranking of our results is done in automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results,” the spokesperson said.
“We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialised; our results come from our algorithms not from humans. For example, if a site contains certain characters, words or phrases, that site may rank higher in a query for those words or phrases.
“As long as retailers follow Microsoft adCenter terms and conditions, then their results will go through the same automated manner.”
If Microsoft hasn’t altered its search results, it does raise concerns regarding the relevance of Bing results.
Although Kogan maintained a politically correct stance, even appeasing Microsoft at some times in his blog post, he couldn’t resist spruiking Google’s search engine, saying Google “prides itself on an objective search algorithm.”
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