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Joe Hall at Search Engine Journal claimed that Bing is playing dirty by changing the Page Title displayed in their search result.

One of the first queries I ran on Bing was my screen name that I use across several different networks “joehall”. On the bottom of the third page of results is a listing to my company’s web site. However, in Bing when running only this query the title of the site appears as my name “Joe Hall”, despite the fact that that page has never been titled anything but the name of the company “JOZSOFT”. The term “Joe Hall” appears once on that page in the sales copy but no other time in the markup.

Frankly, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Bing, as much as other search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Baidu) want to provide best search result to users. If by changing page title it helps users to decide the page they want, then be it. Bing is touted as Decision Engine anyway, not just search engine.

Perhaps, Jon Lee Clark says it better

I was actually very intrigued by the article and the discussion that followed – at least until I got toward the bottom of the comment section. Regardless, @Joe I’m curious, if folks were typing in Joe Hall and they were directed to one of your brand names is that not relevant? Think about the links you’ve built over time … I’m sure a few of those had “Joe Hall” as anchor text no? Perhaps the title tag change is actually a more evolved algo based on relevancy and anchor text. Again these are all assumptions, but I have to be honest – I’m not really seeing how seeing the query “Joe Hall” and the title tag ‘manipulation’ of one of your ‘brand names’ being all that misleading.

As side note: remember the days when all search engines display page description in the search result exactly the same as in the meta-description tag? That is long over. Now, it seems, the days is numbered too for webmasters to decide what page title to display in the search engines.