14 DAY TRIAL // Google and Microsoft have engaged in a war of the words like no other in recent history. The heart of the issue is Bing's alleged copying of Google results and using them to serve its own. The practice was uncovered by Google who set up a sting operation after starting to suspect that Bing was somehow copying results.
It all started with an article by Danny Sullivan, a respected analyst in the search field, and it escalated from there with official responses from both companies and accusations on Twitter.
Google has also wrote an official response, or rather accusation, on its blog, and it doesn't play with words, it flat out accuses Bing of stealing and of being a "stale" version of Google Search.
"By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: 'Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results' and heard Microsoft’s response, 'We do not copy Google's results.' However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, writes.
He then goes on to explain how Google came to the conclusion that Bing was indeed leaning over and taking a peek at Google's results to pass as its own.
It started with a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy a rare surgical procedure. The query "torsorophy" was automatically corrected by Google which then served results based on the correct term.
Initially, Bing did not return any results for the misspelled word. A few months later, Bing had the same top result for "torsorophy" as Google had for "tarsorrhaphy" despite no auto-correction.
This made Google suspicious enough to try to catch Microsoft red-handed. It gamed its own ranking algorithm and put false top results for several weird or very rare queries, which would have a very small likelihood of occurring naturally.
Some of its engineers then started searching for those terms on their home computers using IE8 with the Bing Toolbar installed. Sure enough, after a while, some of the false ranking results started showing up on Bing even as there no results before Google added them.
"Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation," Singhal says.
Of course, it's no secret that Microsoft collects some user data through the Bing Toolbar and the Suggested Sites feature. But Google says it's just not fair for Bing to simply swipe results from it.
Microsoft didn't take the accusations lightly, though it didn't flat out deny them. Still, it's not as bad Google makes it out to be and, frankly, all this spectacle is making both companies look bad.