It’s not too often that a company such as Google will speak quite bluntly about the poor business practices of its competitors, but in this particular case, it might have had good reason to. In its research, it has found that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been ripping off its results, and it has the damning proof to help back those claims up.
Last summer, Google discovered that a misspelling of a surgery procedure on Bing delivered the same result that Google deliberately fixed into its own engine. With a piqued interest, the company began to see if Bing copied other search results as well, or if this was some sort of unbelievable coincidence.
As time went on, the company became increasingly suspicious, and performed a rather robust test. It first created queries that made no logical sense, and tied them to real webpages. It had then equipped 20 of its engineers with freshly formatted laptops, and the users were meant to use Internet Explorer 8, pre-equipped with Bing’s toolbar. Then, these users had to search for the faux search terms and click through to the URL that Google tied to it.
Sure enough, these same exact results ended up being found on Bing as well, and being that these queries are not going to ever be typed in by a real user (eg: juegosdeben1ogrande), Google had rather clear proof that Bing’s engineers have been a bit crafty.
Microsoft has merely brushed off the idea that it was lifting results from Google, stating that it uses a variety of methods to help improve its own search engine. Google on the other hand sees this as a ridiculous business practice, and states that Bing is simply delivering cheap imitations.
In the end, all Google wants from this is for Bing to stop doing what it’s doing. What do you guys think? Should Microsoft and others be free to do this kind of deep searching on the Web? After all, search engines are free, and there doesn’t seem to be an actual rule of using its results for such purposes. It’s still shady though, no doubt about that.
At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.