Google Accuses Bing Of Copying Search Results

Microsoft and Google executives engaged in some contentious back-and-forth during a roundtable discussion at the Farsight Summit on 1 February, suggesting emotions are high in the wake of Google accusing Bing of copying its Web-search results.

“Our testing has concluded that Bing is copying Google Web-search results, and Microsoft doesn’t deny this,” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal in an email to eWEEK.

“At Google, we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there, from Bing and others – algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results copied from a competitor,” he added.

Sting operation

During the Farsight event, Google principal engineer Matt Cutts summarised Google’s accusations against Bing.

The search-engine giant had launched a “sting operation,” finding terms with no matches on Google or Bing, and then artificially driving “honey pot” pages to appear on the top of search results for those terms.

When a small portion of Bing search results seemed to mirror Google’s forced pages, the latter began leveling accusations.

“It’s almost like a map maker who constructs a fake street and sees if that street gets copied,” explained Cutts.

Accusations denied

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Harry Shum seemed unwilling to accept the accusations.

“It’s not like we actually copy anything; it’s more that we learn from the customers who willingly share the data with us,” he said, adding that Bing learns from what kind of queries customers type.

Bing Bar and similar features are capable of feeding that sort of data to Microsoft.

According to Shum, Microsoft’s engineers use over 1,000 signals and features for Bing’s algorithm.

“A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the Web”.

Google’s operation, in Shum’s opinion, was “a spy-novelesque stunt” to generate extreme outliers in tail-query ranking. He claimed it was a creative tactic by a competitor, and Microsoft will take it as “a backhanded compliment”.

Does Google actually own the data?

During the talk, however, Cutts disagreed with that tail-query assessment: “Google search showed up in a lot of queries, popular queries, not just long-tail queries”.

But Shum stuck to his proverbial guns. “What we are saying is that we learn from our customers; we use the customers’ data,” he shot back. “Does Google actually own the data?”

Meanwhile, an email from a Microsoft spokesperson to eWEEK echoed Shum’s comments.

“We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. The overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites,” read the statement.

How this affects the competition between Google and Bing remains to be seen, although Bing has some distance to climb in market share before it presents an existential threat to the search-engine giant.