In this day and age where search engines are competing to provide real-time results, the admission by Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center would come as an embarrassment to Microsoft. He commented that “It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow. I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do.”

This comment was made in response to a user query. The user in question had submitted a sitemap to Bing about 6 weeks back. While Google and Yahoo had indexed hundreds of pages on his site, Bing had indexed only one the homepage.

Considering that the site has genuine backlinks (14 of them according to Bing’s own calculations), it is pretty shabby on Bing’s part to index only one page in 6 weeks. But wait, things get better. Brett Yount, the aforementioned Program Manager suggested the user to check the FAQs. So, let us take a look at what the FAQ suggests.

if your site is not in the index, please do the following:

1. verify in our tools that your site is not blocked
2. run a site: query to verify there are no pages in the index
3. Copy the URL of the site query and post on this thread.

I will work with you to at least get your home page indexed. Deeper indexing will require good content and backlinks as described in the FAQ.

This may be 2010, but Bing is still stuck in the 90s. According to #3 the forum thread will serve as a URL submission thread and someone would add the URLs manually to Bing’s database. Microsoft has big expectations from Bing, but it is silly to expect Bing to return relevant results if it can’t even index pages within an acceptable time frame.