I can’t say how long ago Bing started localizing its search suggestions, but I can confirm that suggestions are different based on the physical location of the user.

I stumbled upon this because we’ve been working on a client case for several months, trying to push a negative suggestion out. When I check his suggestions from my Portland, OR office, I don’t see the suggestion. But when I change my city in Bing to where my client lives, I see the unwanted search suggestion, still sitting there at the bottom.

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So, while my client’s Bing search suggestions are cleaned up in every other city across the United States, they are still not fixed in the city where he lives and does business.

How To Change Bing Search Suggestions In A Local Market

To fix the Bing search suggestions in his city, we’re going to need to create positive search activity IN THAT CITY and there are three ways to do this:

1. Private proxies in that city. This is the preferred method because it’s easier and requires a lot less time and management. Simply find a group of private proxies (you’ll need at least 20 for low volume cases and many more for high volume cases) and perform searches for your positive keywords from those individual proxies for several months until the suggestions clean up.
2. Hire and pay people in that city. Place ads on Craigslist and hire individuals to perform the searches. This is a hassle for a couple reasons – one is that this type of work is a violation of Craigslist TOS, so your ads might get removed (I know from experience, its a real battle). The second is you’re hiring and managing a lot of people one at a time, so it takes a tremendous amount of work to get your outcome. I’ve done this and it’s effective at helping change the search suggestions in a targeted city, but the amount of work involved is ridiculous.
3. Use Geo-targeted Crowdsourcing. CrowdFlower is the only crowdsource site I’m aware of that allows you to geo-target searches and even they will only allow it at the state level, not the city level. So, it’s at least in the ballpark. The bigger issue is that CF TOS don’t permit you to do this sort of manipulation work without being a paying partner, which costs thousands per month. So, unless you’ve got the budget to afford that (and I don’t), you’ve got to choose one of the first 2 options listed above in order to change Bing search suggestions in a local market.

How To Change Your City In Bing

Go to Bing.com and click the gear icon in the upper right hand corner.

Under location, type in the city/state or zip you want and then click save. Now, you’ll see the Bing search suggestions as if you lived in the city you specified.

If you have unwanted suggestions in Bing, we can fix them for you. Call 503-890-6663 for a quote.