Google recently accused the Bing search engine of copying their search results. The whole situation began as Google engineers worked on spelling corrections. Spelling corrections are one of the features that Google takes much pride in. They even claim they can correct misspellings that have never been misspelled before. From the Official Google Blog:
It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.
Based on this case, Google created 100 “synthetic queries” and monitored them closely. These are things a person would probably never search for. Mostly, stuff like [hiybbprqag]. For these queries, they inserted pretty much random sites as the top result. Within a couple of weeks of starting this experiment, Google’s fake results started appearing in Bing. Of course, Microsoft completely denies copying Google:
“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking 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 in order to help us improve the experience for all users.” — Bing Corporate Vice President Harry Shum
It seems that Google was not happy with Microsoft’s denial and their latest post (linked below) goes into detail on the various queries used to catch Bing in the act. Whether it’s something their engineers are doing manually or a result of IE8′s Suggested Sites or Bing Toolbar’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, the end result looks like cheating.
“Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.” — Google Fellow Amit Singhal
via Official Google Blog, Mashable, Search Engine Land