Bing is testing out something interesting – instead of showing the URL of the site, which is pretty standard across search engines, they are showing the company/brand name only.
Here it is in action:
I couldn’t replicate it in the English results. It isn’t clear if it was only for Microsoft URLs.
This test is definitely not a great one. Bing is replacing “well known” brands with the company name only and this could actually cause people to pause before clicking the URL. While it says the company name, many people always want to see the actual URL for phishing reasons and sometimes to see if a URL is https or not.
Thank you Frank Sandtmann for the tip and screenshot.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020
- Analyzing “How Google Search Works” Changes from Google - July 8, 2020
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines Update: New Introduction, Rater Bias & Political Affiliations - December 6, 2019
- Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines: Reputation for News Sites; Video Content Updates; Quality for Information Sites - September 13, 2019
[…] Bing Testing Site Name Only With No URL in Search Results, thesempost.com […]