Bing is blank? | Hacker News Reader

Bing is blank?

bing.com

117 pointsrljy83 comments

Upside: renders quickly and identically in all browsers.

Actually, it doesn't 'render'. Looking in dev tools, it's a 404.

They forgot to make a 404 page?

You can still return any page data you'd like with a 404 status. They are returning with a Content-Length of 0, so no page is sent. So it is rendering properly, it's rendering nothing.

Don't most browsers present a default 404 page?

HTTPS gets me a blank page. The no-S version works fine:

http://www.bing.com/

Same here, http://www.bing.com works fine.

Me too.

At first I thought the https dom rendering was locked, but it really is an ~empty tree (head with empty style, body).

The bigger question here is: Why were you looking at Bing to begin with? It has probably been like this for months.

5 people couldn't do their searches today.

Interestingly enough, according to Alexa bing.com is #10 ranked site in the US, #22 worldwide.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com

Remember that it's the default page for a lot of people who don't know how to change it.

The number of time I had to fix that on people's computers...

#10 in the search engine world might as well not exist.

It's #10 of all sites, not just search engines.

OOPS! That's not a bad number at all then.

Recently, iOS7 shifted all Siri queries to Bing by default. Seems to work quite similarly, but I'm sure that's pushing accesses and usage quite a bit more now.

Thats the initial first load of IE causing that traffic, then the user goes to their next journey. You really need analysis on 'http://www.bing.com/search?q='

bing is good for certain things, if you know what I mean >_~

.... video search

I find their translate tool better than Google. I sometimes get a garbled English translation from Google, Bing more often returns a more comprehensible English translation. Of course, I can't vouch for how accurate the translation is.

Also, the photos they showcase everday on their site are often quite awesome or beautiful.

I find the "Birds Eye" view in their maps service to be useful and neat.

Bing's video search with the SafeSearch turned off is probably the best porn search engine/browser on the internet. I'm guessing the OP was looking for porn. At least that's what I'm usually doing with it. Now why was he trying to access Bing via an HTTPS connection which lead him to this blank page? I'm guessing naughty porn.

That's the latest redesign. Microsoft are going for an increasingly minimalistic trend.

They were early to the FlatUI trend. Now they are starting the ZeroUI trend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6937854

Yep, expect 100% blank iPhone's coming in IOS 8.

90% blank iPhones 100% blank Zunes

I really like the new design, very good example of the new minimalist trend and "flat" look. It is really able to convey all the value I see in Bing in such a simple and minimalistic design.

Best move Microsoft has made since Windows XP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6937698

My comment was sarcastic, I know that it's just a bug.

So was mine.

https://bing.com/ works fine, but https://www.bing.com/ doesn't work.

https://bing.com redirects to http://www.bing.com. https://www.bing.com doesn't redirect. It's just sloppy.

Ugh, an SSL-stripping redirect? Poor form!

It may have to due with avoiding man-in-the-middle or redirect attack, but I am not too familiar with the logistics of redirecting from https to https.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

How does a story like this with all of the comment circle-jerking make it to the top of hacker news? I really wish I could down vote stories.

Because everyone adores Microsoft, and is horrified and gutted that such a useful and loved addition to the internet ecosphere, backed by such an understaffed and money-starved corporation could be hindered by such a tragedy.

And because everyone is a sarcastic prick.

And on that note, does the fact that this is only occurring on HTTPS indicate that the only secure Bing is an empty Bing?

There's been a LOT of uninteresting shit on the front page the past couple days. I consider them off-topic and flag them. Stories such as:

* How to defend yourself when your photo is ridiculed on Reddit (this has what to do with startups or technology?)

* Protesters charged with 'Terrorism Hoax' for too much glitter on their banner (same here)

* Amazon issues "Choking Hazard" warning for Testable JavaScript (the Daily WTF is that way →)

* this one (oh noes a 404 somewhere on teh interwebs, let's crack jokes)

all deserve flagging for being off-topic.

But what really bugs me is that all of the top level comments should be nested under one single comment labelled "silly one liners".

https://duckduckgo.com/

Problem solved.

Doesn't ddg use bing underneath?

DDG is a meta engine, it uses a multitude of search providers.

404 apparently

  curl -I https://www.bing.com
  HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

It's not much of a challenge to beat Google at UI design but I am happy Bing team is constantly widening the gap.

First the reason I started using it: Google introducing ridiculously frequent captchas for VPN users.

Now there is an option to choose local/international search with one click instead of diving into constantly changing settings menu when using Google.

Also disabling adult filter without logging in is kinda handy and one would think basic privacy feature. Google is becoming more and more user hostile with every change and I like Bing more and more.

I like Google atm because it works ;)

We found him: timthelion is the one person that actually uses Bing.

Psst .. DDG uses Bing. As does Facebook.

as do Yahoo and Siri

MS should reward you for noticing, rarely anyone actually goes onto bing.com

I know your post was said in jest, but bing is ranked #22 on Alexa and #10 in the US. (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com) and gets over 17% of search marketshare.

The top sites, if people are curious: http://www.alexa.com/topsites

I think it ranks highly for the same reason that MSN.com used to rank highly (I think MSN was even the number 1 site for a time); I.E., It has nothing to do with actual hard-earned popularity, and everything to do with default settings in IE.

Bing is also the search engine for popular sites such as Yahoo and Facebook and the default search engine for Siri.

The flattest UI.

It's modern hyper-minimalism. GENIUS!

best it's ever looked

https://ssl.bing.com is where they host "secure" content at, apparently. [1]

[1] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Assl.bing.com

For posterity: http://i.imgur.com/mb3bpwJ.png

Less is more? http://d.pr/i/FhLN

Seems to be an SSL problem.

Technically, SSL is still working fine. The 404 page-not-found result is delivered over the secure channel :)

I know nothing about the Microsoft Bing servers, but my stab-in-the-dark guess would be that somebody changed something on the load-balancers that handle SSL termination, and now they're proxying to the wrong pool of back-end servers.

Link to previous discussion on subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041

I'm only getting the problem on https... http://www.bing.com/ works for me.

bing doesn't do SSL. Possible reasons:

1. Microsoft is cheap. SSL/TLS encryption of content requires a little more processing power. 2. The Bing API doesn't support HTTP/S. Could be a JSONP limitation. 3. Conspiracy Theory: Microsoft wants to fill up NSA's snooping storage archive, so they can sell them more Windose and SQL servers.

Microsoft's CEO is not going to be happy.

Good thing that they fired their CEO.

I noticed this a while ago that it doesn't load with https. Can't believe they still haven't fixed that.

Preparing for a white Christmas.

Wow, these companies are really overdoing their minimalist design nowadays.

Someone wrote the index controller in php and deployed a syntax error

I would be rather surprised if MS used PHP and not ASP

They actually use a LAMP stack. /s

Brought to you by the NSA

They're taking their flat UI a little too seriously.

At least it'll be Internet Explorer compatible.

As it should be.

HTTPS?

It's back now.

Not here. I like the new minimalistic design

Not for me. HTTP is good, HTTPS is not.

No it's not.

Confirmed.

kiko: Its a cow eating grass

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