At least, I assume that's what's going on (yes, it's obviously not what's going on, but people should be careful...) from the fact that the Unix administrator of Carphone Warehouse has left the following Sidewiki:

Sidewiki abusers - it says who you are ...

That quote in full is:

One of the biggest IT companies on the web - One of the most useless websites I have ever visited.. Has been consistantly crap since I first started using the Internet.. Its just overly bloated without any real direction.. Only time I ever use it is via deep links from search engines..

I've blocked out his name to spare his blushes. If you do this, remember that it says who you are. Unless you use a fake account to slag off the daily mail.

Still, probably not as serious as possibly accidentally libelling a global brand, so I've removed any mention of possible breaches of the law. And of course I have no way of knowing who the poster was or whether they were using their real name. And I'm sure that Microsoft as an organisation had no knowledge of the comment.

Oh, and I don't really think they manually removed the post, either.

I might as well just delete this post now! But I'll leave it here as a record of how you (I) need to be more careful ... Still, the whois record is correct.</update>

Microsoft seems to have reacted badly to my post on the usability of bing - someone left a comment defending it without revealing they were a Microsoft employee.

And they've either manually deleted the post from the bing search results or it's taken them more than four six days to index it ...!

1 The blog comment

Yohan left this comment over on my original post, defending bing and giving me a bit of a slagging off.

Whois record for Yohan's comment

However, a check on the IP address used to post this comment, reveals ... that it is owned by one Microsoft.com at 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond.

2 Did Microsoft delete my post from bing's results?

If you search Google for 'bing usabilty', my original post comes top.

If you do the same search on bing, you get my homepage on page 2 of the results but no sign of the post itself.

If you do a search on bing for 'usability bing nightmare' (so using more words from the post's heading), again you get my homepage but no sign of the post.

And finally, do a search on bing for the full heading in quotes, and you get a couple of other pages from this blog (where you can see the heading in the recent posts list).

So, either bing hasn't indexed the post 4 six days later (= rubbish search engine) OR they've taken it out the bing index.

<Update> Thinking about it some more, maybe bing does that annoying thing google does of indexing a page and then making it vanish for a day or so while it moves it from one database to another one. Either way, not an impressive result not to be even showing the URL exists 4 days later - now 6 days later ...</update>

3 I know they're watching

Am I attributing too much importance to this blog (probably;))!?

One other oddity is that I tried to get @bing to talk to me about it. Although @bing is happy to reply to other people on twitter, they ignored my tweets to them.

Although I did notice via my tr.im statistics that shortly after my message to them, 3 people clicked on the link to the post.

According to intertwitter, @bing and I share just 16 followers. It could be that, of those 16, 3 were online at 11pm-ish when I sent the direct tweet to @bing and clicked the link.

Or it could be that the bing employees actively using @bing at that time to reply to people uisng @bing or #bing in their tweets saw it, clicked on it, but refused to reply.

What do you think?

Much of this evidence is circumstantial. Am I paranoid, or is Microsoft out to get me?