Bing Glitch Causes Either Just Ads Or Just Organic Listings To Display On Search Results

A funky thing happened today on Bing. Depending on your location, it appears, Bing returned search results with either nearly all ads or the opposite, just organic results. All Paid With the exception of image search results and related search suggestions, the only results on a search for “jeans” were ads.  Below is a desktop […]

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A funky thing happened today on Bing. Depending on your location, it appears, Bing returned search results with either nearly all ads or the opposite, just organic results.

All Paid

With the exception of image search results and related search suggestions, the only results on a search for “jeans” were ads.  Below is a desktop screenshot; the same results were seen on both tablet and smartphone as well.

bing results with no organic listings

A similar thing happened on a search for “running shoes” with just ads showing, but here instead of suggesting related searches Bing returned a “No results found” message. bing serp running shoes no organic results

All Organic

Both of the search results above happened on the East Coast. On the West Coast, during this period, editors saw either typical results or results with just organic listings. At the same time I was looking at the all-ads SERP for “jeans” on the East Coast, a search for “jeans” on the West Coast had no ads at all.

bing serp with no ads

I can’t confirm if the divide was truly coastal, but that’s what we saw anecdotally across our team.

It’s not clear how long the issue lasted, but Bing fixed the glitch within an hour of us first spotting the issues. A Microsoft spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “Microsoft became aware of an issue earlier this morning causing some users to experience intermittent access to Bing. We took immediate action and restored access to the service.”


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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