Spam Filters, Browser Battles and Just What’s Up With Bing?

This is going to be a quick one since I really should get to sleep.

I really do seem to get all my best work (or indeed all my extracurricular work) done on Sunday these days. Every weekend I think to myself that Sunday will indeed be a day of rest – I’ll watch films, drink a couple of beers, maybe even turn on my criminally unloved Xbox 360 and shoot something, but although films get watched and beer gets quaffed, I seem to be spending a lot of the day in front of the PC.

Most of my time gets spent on MakeSenseOfThis and today’s been no different. I put a new post up on there today discussing most of what’s been going on with it and alluded to the fact that I might be writing a post about my love/ hate affair with spam and although I’ll be doing it, this post isn’t it. That said, the spam on that site is the kind I hate, so I’m glad the filter’s catching it. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s just, well, there.

As part of my investigation of what’s going on with the site, I looked at which pages and posts have been indexed by the different search engines. Google seems to be pretty bang on – the whole site appears to have been picked up by its spiders and Yahoo’s not too far behind, but I just can’t seem to find any evidence that Bing’s actually crawled anything on there. Even looking into the Microsoft search engines’ Webmaster Tools doesn’t tell me if anything more than the homepage has been picked up and all the rank checking tools I’ve tried return no results for this particular engine.

Added to which indignity, Bing’s Webmaster Tools isn’t what I’d describe as particularly useful – it seems to be a cut-down version of Google Analytics with a little bit of site data thrown in for good measure and I can’t find anything in there to tell it to crawl my site faster. All in all, Bing isn’t playing nicely.

Apart from that, my shiny upgraded PC still has three browsers installed on it (Firefox, Chrome and Opera) and it really does seem like a lottery as to which one I’ll use to submit this post. I like Opera for its speed and simplicity, I like Firefox for the ridiculous amount of functions I can add to it with the plugins, and Chrome seems to be the blend between the two. I’m not sure I’ll ever decide which one to stick with.

That was a little bit longer than I intended it to be, but I type fast so it wasn’t too bad. Thanks for reading.