As you note, that “vista flaws” search result is odd and I’m not sure what sort of incompetence would explain it. Surely fewer people type “flaws in Microsoft vista” as a search term because it is longer and it contains a stop word (”in”) that many how-to-search guides will tell you to leave out.

Sure “vista flaws” search is odd, but “flaws in Microsoft vista” is fine. Which suggests they haven’t directly tampered with the ranking, or index of pages, but it may simply be a figment of a poorly phrased search term.

I did a few searches, and nothing stands out especially suspect. Indeed the search quality is comparable to Google, and often results are almost identical to Google.

There are some things that differ curiously, ordering of “bad vista” results, but it looks to me more to do with subdomains, or site navigation, than bias.

As they say, never assign to conspiracy that which may adequately be explained by incompetence.

I wonder if “Microsoft sucks” is considered too extreme to be worth tampering with the results. If you’re that set against it, you’re not going to buy their stuff no matter what you find, are you?

But if they provide you with half-decent search results, you might still use Bing when you go looking for OpenOffice…

http://www.soggyblogger.com/blog/2009/06/not-bad-for-bing.html

I guess that was too obvious and they are more inconspicuous with their manipulations.