Bing Copies Google's Search Results, Says Google

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Did you think that search was boring now and all the tech news drama is taking place in the mobile space? Think again! Today, a dust-up is taking place between Microsoft and Google regarding search results. Bing has been an up and coming search engine, and many see it as the only threat to Google. But now, Google has uncovered that Bing is copying their search results and Search Engine Land did the full writeup.

According to Danny Sullivan’s story at Search Engine Land, Google noticed in May of 2010 that Bing was doing very well at returning the same results as Google when something was misspelled in the search bar. Google became more concerned in October of 2010, when they say that they noticed that Bing was starting to overlap more top 10 search results in various internal competitive metrics that Google uses.

Google suspected that they were being copied by Bing, so they set up a honey trap. They set up three nonsense words: “hiybbprqag”, “mbzrxpgjys” and “indoswiftjobinproduction” – which were specifically coded to go to completely unrelated sites. The first one would go to The Wiltern Theatre website, the second would go to RIM’s website (not Android – make your own assumptions) and the third would go to Sandra Lee’s webpage on the Food Network site (“Hi y’all.”) These results did not come up on Bing and Google would be able to tell if Bing was copying them.

Unfortunately, all three results were matched on Bing (don’t bother searching for them now, the results have become flooded with articles about this story). Google has come out, accusing Bing of cheating off of them. Google’s Amit Singhal said:

It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work. I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.

There are certianly legal questions here too, considering that Bing is ‘selling’ their services as a search provider. Remember that Bing now provides the search engine back-end stuff for Yahoo!, while Yahoo gets to sell the ads for Bing. Now, if Bing is ‘borrowing’ from Google – doesn’t Google deserve some of the income from Bing’s search business. I’m not a lawyer (I do play one on the internet), but it seems like there could be legal trouble ahead for Google and Bing.

Oddly enough, the BigThink conference is going on today in Silicon Valley and there was a previously arranged panel on spam in search engine results. Matt Cutts from Google and Harry Shum from Bing were on the panel, as was Rick Skrenta from Blekko (Blekko, if you haven’t heard about it, is a new startup search engine that’s gaining popularity. I’m no fan of it, though).

Per TechCrunch’s coverage of the BigThink panel, it sounds like Shum had a lot of excuses as to why the Bing results (appear to) copy Google. Shum said:

If you look at how each search engine ranks the results, Matt Cutts is referring to a few outlier examples. It’s not like we actually copied anything. We actually learn from our customers. Do you mean that Google owns the data?

Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

We don’t use clicks on Bing’s users on Google rankings.

That’s all for now. I imagine this story will become bigger and bigger over the next few days.