Via Search Engine Roundtable comes news of refreshing candor from a Bing employee about the performance of Bing’s crawler, which is still referred to as MSNbot. The admission happened yesterday in the Bing Webmaster Center forums, when Brett Yount, a program manager for Bing, replied to a question about why Bing has only indexed one page from a sitemap that was submitted six weeks ago.

(In case the image is difficult to read, Brett Yount’s statement is: “It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow. I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do.”)

When Bing introduced MSNbot 2.0b in November, it promised the new bot would “do a better job” of crawling the web. It apparently hasn’t sped up much, at least not yet.

Comments like this make Bing an easy target for sarcastic replies, but I find the honesty refreshing. It’s better to have statements like this than PR jargon that ignores or downplays the real situation.