After noticing curious search results at Bing, then running a sting operation to investigate further, Google has concluded that Microsoft is copying Google search results into its own search engine.
That's the report from Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan today, who talked to both companies about it and presented Google's evidence. According to the report, a mechanism could be the Suggested Sites feature of Internet Explorer and the Bing Toolbar for browsers, both of which can gather data about what links people click when running searches.
The story began with Google's team for correcting typographical errors in search terms, which monitors its own and rivals' performance closely. Typos that Google could correct would lead to search results based on the correction, but the team noticed Bing would also lead to those search results without saying it had corrected the typo.
Next came the sting, setting up a "honeypot" to catch the operation in action. Google created "one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term," then wired those results for particular, highly obscure search terms such as "hiybbprqag" and "ndoswiftjobinproduction," Sullivan said. With the hand coding, typing those search terms would produce recognizable Web pages in Google results that wouldn't show in search results otherwise.
Next, Google had employees type in those search terms from home using Internet Explorer with both Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Before the experiment, neither Bing nor Google returned the hand-coded results, but two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded.
Microsoft didn't say today whether it plans to continue the practice, but evidently it doesn't consider it "cheating," as Google does.
In a comment to ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft said, flatly, "We do not copy Google's results." However, that denial turns out to be more a matter of interpretation.
(news.cnet.com)
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