I'm so fed up with Google's SERP and general "whatever" attitude that I'm using Bing as my default search engine " and liking it a lot, too. Not only has it got cleaner, less spam ridden results for some searches than Google does; Firefox's top thinks it has a better, safer privacy policy too.

That doesn't mean I embrace Bing as the next Kool-Aid dispenser; I'm the first to admit Bing is (still) a work in progress and therefore among the first to admit its failures.

FAIL: minus 7C is not 44.6F

Located in Canada temperatures are expressed in Celsius for me. For my other inclined North Americans I have to translate that to Fahrenheit. In my grandmother's mother's childhood we had conversion calculators or tables for it; nowadays we have conversion built right into our favorite search engine (see: Bing).

So when Jessica D'Amico mentioned the temperature at her place, I wanted to respond with the one here. <click> <click> type in address bar: "7C in F <enter>

And what do I see?

Bing no negative conversion

 

That's -7c in f according to Bing

Here's how Google handles it correctly:

Google negative conversion

 

What search engine weirdness have you spotted?

About the Author: Ruud Hein

I love helping to make web sites make it. From the ground up if needed. CSS challenges, server-side scripting, user and device friendly JavaScript tricks search engines have no problems with. Tracking how the sites perform and then figuring out how to make that performance and the tracking better. I'm passionate about information. No matter how often I trim my feeds in my feed readers (yes, I use more than one), I always have a couple of hundred in there covering topics ranging from design to usability, from SEO to SEM, from life hacks to productivity blogs, from.... Well, you get the idea, I guess. Knowledge and information management is close to my heart. Has to be with the amount of information I track. My "trusted system" is usually in flux but always at hand and fully searchable. My paid passion job at Search Engine People sees me applying my passions and knowledge to a wide array of problems, ones I usually experience as challenges. It's good to have you here: pleased to meet you!