Last year, sick and tired of Google and their ‘playing God’ with search when it comes to online writers and how our articles come up in Google search, I switched all my searches to Bing. Bing is pretty, Bing is fast, and Bing usually pulled up just what I want, unlike Google, which now shows me tons of scraper sites as my top choices. But, Bing does have one gigantic search problem. All my Bing searches, in the last couple of weeks, are pulling up Chinese websites written in the Chinese language, and barely anything in English. Bing. Dudes. What the feck?
Now, let me explain, I live in Thailand so am used to having searches on Yahoo, Google and other search engines pull up Thai sites first. Then I have to go through various online gyrations to get only English. But, that Bing is pulling up searches in Chinese when, even if I live in Thailand, we don’t speak Chinese here, leads me to believe the numbnuts at Bing don’t know the difference between Chinese and Thai.
So Bing, dudes, here are a couple of hints. Thai uses its own alphabet, or abugida (a writing system where a consonant and a vowel are combined and written as one unit). The Thai ‘alphabet’ has 44 consonants and 28 vowels – (yes, it does, and they’re a bitch to learn).
Written Chinese, on the other hand, isn’t even an alphabet or abugida. Instead, characters are used to represent words or parts of words and, at last count, there were tens of thousands of them. Characters differ, too, depending on if its Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese (or even other Chinese dialects).
Now, when I do a search on Bing, and get pages of Chinese characters attached to website URLs, I couldn’t tell you if what I get is Mandarin or Cantonese, or a mix of both. Why? BECAUSE I DON’T SPEAK CHINESE.
I do however, speak, and read and write, to a certain extent, Thai and, I can tell you, Bing dudes, that what your search engine is pulling up for me, as I sit in my apartment in Bangkok, is not Thai, not even remotely close.
So, please, before you do your next algorithm change, familiarize yourself with Thai and Chinese, and change your algorithm to reflect that. It’s bad enough having to switch all my searches from Thai to English (if I wanted Thai, I’d be searching in Thai, as would most of Thailand), but when I get Chinese, I just want to smack someone.
