Copycat? Google Says Bing Copies Search Results

The search wars have heated up, with Google charging that Bing is copying Google's search results, even gobbledygook queries. Google says an experiment found URLs from Google searches turned up on Bing and proved Microsoft is mining Google search results. Microsoft called Google's experiment a stunt and a "backhanded compliment."

Is Bing copying Google's search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no -- and it's stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing's alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries -- even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
"We created about 100 'synthetic queries' -- queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query."
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results -- i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal said. "We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google's suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they get.
A Spy-Novelesque Stunt
Microsoft quickly responded to Google's allegations. Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Bing, called the issue 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 backhanded compliment," Shum said. "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 went on to say that many companies across the Internet use collective intelligence to make their products better every day and defended Bing's "distinct approach to search."
A Bitter PR Turn
So who's right? Is Bing all-out copying Google's search results? Or is Bing simply improving its search engine based on collective intelligence?
As Greg Sterling sees it, the verbal brawl marks a bitter public-relations turn in the intensifying competition between the two companies.
"Arguably Google did catch Bing doing something improper and copying selected Google results. But people also defend what Bing was doing as capturing 'public' user behavior and clicks and factoring that into its algorithm," Sterling said. "As it stands now, this isn't going to have much of an impact on consumers in the end, but among tech insiders it would appear to tarnish Bing's brand."