Stefan Mileschin

The CEO of online electronics retailer Kogan, Ruslan Kogan, has backed down from his startling allegation that Bing and Yahoo deliberately removed his website from their search engines.

Kogan claimed that Vole had censored his company as a punishment for criticising Internet Explorer 7.

Last month he hit the headlines when he said that his company would charge more to those who used IE7 to make a purchase on their website in a bid to get them to upgrade their browsers.

After the announcement made the headlines, the company noticed that its website had stopped appearing in organic search results on the Microsoft-owned search engines Bing and Yahoo!

Exactly two days after the "IE 7 tax" went public all traffic from Bing and Yahoo dried up completely, Kogan told Fairfax.

Fairfax did some checking and while Bing and Yahoo search returns listings for Kogan's Facebook and Twitter pages, there was no link to the official website, kogan.com.

But today Kogan seems to have had a change of heart and has stopped short of accusing the tech giant of tampering with its search engine results, even defending them.

He now says that the there must have been a bug in Microsoft's end. He could not see a massive professional company like Microsoft choosing to censor search results because it'd affect how people view the search engine.

However, no one seems to be explaining why two days after he ran his anti IE7 campaign Vole dropped him from Bing.

http://news.techeye.net/internet/kog...nsorship-claim