Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

[REW Tyler]

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

It's quite a large article, you can find the rest of it here: http://searchengineland.com/google-b...-results-62914

[info@mantlo.com]

Agreed. Thats cheating in my book. However if they use this at a further stage to improve then I call it inspiration :-)

[JimOlenbush]

The Sting Operation

To verify its suspicions, Google set up a sting operation. For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls “synthetic” searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google.

These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor quality matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. With the code enabled, Google placed a honeypot page to show up at the top of each synthetic search.

The only reason these pages appeared on Google was because Google forced them to be there. There was nothing that made them naturally relevant for these searches. If they started to appeared at Bing after Google, that would mean that Bing took Google’s bait and copied its results.

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.

Wow, caught red-handed it seems

[REW Tyler]

Bing has formally responded to Google’s charges that Bing is copying search results, accusing Google of trying a “spy-novelesque stunt” and defending the use of customer activity to influence Bing’s search results.

Harry Shum, Corporate VP at Bing, is speaking right now at the Bing/Big Think “Future of Search” event (see Danny Sullivan’s live coverage here), and his comments are echoed in a new blog post just published on Bing’s search blog.

More here: http://searchengineland.com/bing-adm...ue-stunt-63162

Time to break out the popcorn, this could get interesting.

[Eric Blackwell]

@Jim O - Yeah... sure seems that we are looking at Milli Bing-illi...grin

Thanks for the post Tyler.

Off to write a post about how Bing suffers from Relevance deficiency and that they took some Vitamin G to solve it. Too funny.

Search Engine on Search Engine violence is...kinda fun! grin

Eric

[rew tracy]

The saga continues:
Google and Microsoft relive Joan Collins catfight: Hair pulled, eyes scratched over 'stolen search results'

P.S. I really like the "Vitamin G" comment ^_^

[Brett M]

Too funny. I thought the results were getting pretty similar!

[Portland Real Estate]

I definitely noticed a trend in this direction on Bing searches looking more like Google searches, but I'm curious if Google really has a case here or this is just a publicity stunt.

[Eric Blackwell]

I just finished my post. I typically don't like to be opinionated about search engines...just prefer to test, and benefit, but the more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me.

Here is my post on it.

Would love some of your thoughts on it and will be happy to link to them from mine if you post them. You don't have to agree with my take at all, but I think it is one of the more interesting stories on the web right now.

best

Eric

[Chris_ORL]

My take is that this is cheating, but this is the wild west here - who cares? Almost anything goes on the internet, and how many companies online build tools, rankings, and opinions based on what other people do? That is the internet!

In this day in age the consumer eats it up. Before google, what was the most popular search engine besides yahoo? Dogpile, because it searched 13 different ones and gavethem to you in one place. Who likes RottenTomatoes.com? They're popular because they take other website and especially newspaper sites and aggregate the review scores to rank them. Is this not also cheating or stealing? I could keep going on here.

How is this so different? At the end of the day, the consumer shouldn't care about how Bing gets better, but that it does. Let's be honest, search is still mostly crap except for highly searched terms, and people are gaming the system. This whole thing was a marketing ploy by Google to get the attention off of how Google results are getting worse because of Ehow and other spammers and content farms that spin useless info. Instead, now they are pointing the finger at Bing saying we may suck in some areas, but Bing is copying us and is worse. This totally goes along with the shift in power that just happened at Google because this is all based off of info that happened quite a while ago and is just coming out now. Coincidence? I think not.