Interesting that for FM100.6 Bing algorithm ranks 100.6 more relevant than the literal 100-6, almost as if it doesn't know what to do with the "-" character. Using "Field Manual" instead of "FM" gives results closer to what you were looking for.
Two sites that I've put up in the past 6 months have yet to be crawled by bing (it indexed the main page of one, but has absolutely nothing for the second), despite it indexing links pointing to those sites and me submitting them to be indexed months ago. They are both completely distinct, unrelated and on separate servers. Meanwhile, google started crawling them immediately.
Interestingly, on the one that eventually got the home page indexed by bing, the bulk of the content is still not linked from the main page, but can be fully crawled via deeper links people have posted elsewhere. Google crawled it via those links, Bing still only sees the front page.
This seems like a fabulously awful marketing message. Every time they say it, they concede that Google offered superior search quality up until now. If they're going to compete on features, like "entertainment search" or pretty front pages, they should neutralize the concern about results quality, not turn it into the entire horse race.
But in both cases, the product still sucks. Saying that your product has "caught up" gives the customer a greater incentive to question any future improvements and any other marketing material coming from your organization.
After Domino's said they did better and after a taste-test I discovered it was still worse than Papa John's, I mock the Domino's commercials and will never visit a Domino's again. Same with Bing.
FTA: "We've got a lot of work to do," Mehdi said during his presentation. "It's not like people wake up in the morning, and say, 'Dang, I wish I had another search engine.' "
This is the problem with Bing, not anything technical. Why start a business built around a service that you don't think anyone wants? A product which beats the market leader in one or several clearly defined niches has a chance in the long run, but no one wanted Bing except Microsoft. It was and is a product looking for a market. It would take catastrophic failure at Google for Bing to split the market.
I am not rooting for one team or the other, nor am I against diversity in the market. I just think the quote above reveals something about the product development process at Microsoft that I'd be wary of if I were an employee or investor.
Microsoft is in the ecosystem business. The product they provide their customers is an entire software and development ecosystem. They don't have to be best-of-class in every category, but they need to be competitive.
Meanwhile Google search results are going back to the Altavista days thanks to dumbing it down to help newbs and so many SEO sites. Very often I have to put quotes and plus signs in searches or else Google will just tell me something similar (not just a simple "do you mean Y" link.)
There's a need for a better search engine or a google management shake-up.
Compare "We have caught up" to "We took longer, because we wanted to get it right". I think Steve Jobs delivers it even better, but I am too lazy to look up the exact sentence. Both is saying the same thing, but the second version (in Steve Job's variant) can make the competition look bad.
I think the two versions are both fairly honest, though, and wouldn't be if reversed. Microsoft has had an inferior search project for a long time and is playing catch-up with Google. Apple simply took a long time getting the device to market, but when they did, it was completely game-changing.
Their implementation of multitasking, to which that sentence was referring, still seems to be inferior. Or let's say different, for diplomacy - yet they make it sound as if they are ahead.
Oh, I thought it was the iPad. Misremembered. At any rate, Apple really did wait to release their implementation. They didn't have inferior multitasking for years. They could have stuck in a very poor implementation to begin with (the OS has always supported it), but they did indeed wait on it.
This happened frequently when I tried using Bing exclusively.