serpapi
[Bing Search API] Weird search results
On top of the empty result, I'm also seeing weird behavior on the Bing results.
After testing it both on playground and API, I think it only happens on our playground.
For example, when I'm searching for "Apple," it shows all the results from "discussion.apple.com" which is very different from the actual results on Bing.
Search results for "Nike"
ref for empty search: https://github.com/serpapi/public-roadmap/issues/2330
Odd, it's as if a "site:" parameter were injected into the query.
A customer reported this issue.
One of the examples also has empty HTML, but contains results in the JSON.
Here are some examples they shared:
Search Inspector 1 | Search Inspector 2 | Search Inspector 3
I was able to replicate their example after a couple retries in the Playground:
After testing it both on playground and API, I think it only happens on our playground.
It's also worth noting that this behavior is not specific to the Playground, as the Source User Agent for the customer's examples is Ruby.
The customer mentioned that they have been noticing this issue since at least 3 days.
I think this issue may be largely the same as this one: https://github.com/serpapi/public-roadmap/issues/1550
Customer followed up on this reporting this is heavily impacting their workflows.
A change has been deployed that has seen significant improvements for this issue during benchmarking.
I don't want to mark this as resolved as the change wasn't specifically to address this, so I will carry out some more targeted benchmarks to better confirm before updating the status.
It's probably also worth keeping an eye out for new reports (or lack thereof) to see if there's a correlation.
A user reported some valid queries that are returning empty again. These work in actual Bing.
I also tested a search for "elon musk" in our API where the location was Italy and got Chinese results for zhihu.com only:
A customer reached out to flag additional Bing-related strangeness:
Texas-based search returns Japanese results:
Search for a person returns listings for pain-relief gel:
I was able to get a strange result of my own with the above query, which seemed to only take the first word of the search term:
The customer has also been experiencing searches that do not return results:
Search Inspector 1 | Search Inspector 2
Search samples from the enterprise customer above:
Inspect - many Wikipedia pages | Inspect - mobile links | Inspect - many duplicates
A few more reports, including Enterprise Customer. Some results are empty, some are returned in the wrong language.
Another high volume customer reported both the results for only the first word, and results that look like a "site:" operator was used.
Another user reached out as they are facing this issue. They are also using the site: operator in the query:
A Customer complained about this. Using the site: on the keyword now returns unrelated website.
An experimental fix for this has been deployed and is rolling out to a fixed percentage of searches.
We aim to roll it out to all searches once stability has been proven at scale.
The examples from this issue can be seen working with higher quality results below:
Hi @leemul, thank you for your message.
As @dsojevic mentioned, the solution looks stable in terms of the quality of results, but we're yet to determine how it'll perform at scale. We'll make sure to let you know as soon as we have more information.