Funny Cheating Poster

Google has a bone to pick with Bing.  It seems the folks at Google think the folks over at Bing are cheating and copying its search results.

In fact, Google has run a “sting operation” of sorts that would seem to prove that Bing is looking over its shoulder and copying answers.

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

Interestingly enough, Bing doesn’t deny this.

Here’s what went down.  In a nutshell, Google folks started to notice that Bing results were beginning to look more and more like Google’s, almost matching them result for result in some cases.

So to confirm its suspicions, Google set up a sting operation. For the first time in the search engine’s history, Google manufactured a crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a given page for a certain search term, temporarily anyway.

it then created about 100 “synthetic” searches that few people, if any, would ever enter into Google.

These searches all returned no results on Google or Bing before the experiment went live, but after Google activated the code, certain pages would start to show up for those terms.

In other words, the only reason these pages would show up on Google was because Google made it so.

So in December, some Google engineers ran some test Google searches at home for one of the target search queries, using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. The engineers were instructed click on the top results. They started the experiment on December 17, and sure enough, by December 31, some of the same search results started showing up on Bing.

One of those test search queries was a Google search for the made-up word “hiybbprqag“.  Here are Google’s search results for “hiybbprqag”…

hiybbprqag Google

Now, obviously, before Google began its experiment, there were NO natural results for the term “hiybbprqag”, but once the experiment started, Google FORCED the result above, that teamonetickets.com result, to start showing up.

Then a few days later, here’s what came up when you searched for “hiybbprqag” on Bing…

hiybbprqag Bing

Imagine that.

Google then did the same thing for the word “mbzrxpgjys“…

mbzrxpgjys Google

…and here are the results that later started showing up on Bing for “mbzrxpgjys”…

mbzrxpgjys Bing

Google then tried it again with “indoswiftjobinproduction“…

indoswiftjobinproduction Google

…and here are the results that then started showing up on Bing for “indoswiftjobinproduction”…

indoswiftjobinproduction Bing

So, it seems that Bing was using some customer search data to come up with essentially the same results as Google.  Bing doesn’t seem to think that there’s anything wrong with this.  Their products, such as the aforementioned “Suggested Sites” tool and the “Bing Bar” pretty much tell you that they’re collecting data to “improve” your experience.

In fact, the folks at Bing have defended their actions, and now accuse Google of pulling a “spy-novelesque stunt” to try and catch their hand in the cookie jar, when really, they’re just trying to improve the user’s experience.

Harry Shum, Corporate VP at Bing, posted the following in a new blog post:

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

Shum added later: “We have been very clear. We use the customer data to help improve the search experience,” and in the blog post above, Shum says that all search engines should be doing the same:

“We all learn from our collective customers, and we all should.”

So what do YOU think? Is Bing cheating, or are they just using customer search data to improve user experience?

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