Google accuses rival of copying after ‘Bing sting’

Google has accused Bing of copying its search results after conducting a sting operation which it claims shows the Microsoft-owned rival uses software to track what people are searching for on Google.

Google's experiment - or 'Bing sting' - involved inventing 100 'synthetic queries' (search terms that nobody would ever enter into its search engine) and linking them to a totally unrelated web page.

For example, the term, 'juegosdeben1ogrande' was linked to a web page selling hip-hop bling jewellery.

Within weeks, the same term, when entered into Bing's search engine, returned the same web page in its search results. Google's point is that there was absolutely no link between the word 'juegosdeben1ogrande' and the hip-hop bling page, except the link it had artificially made to catch out Bing. 

Google suspects that Microsoft is using its Internet Explorer web browser or the Bing toolbar to harvest data on what people are using Google to search for.

"Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing," writes Google Fellow Amit Singhal in his official blog. "Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results - a cheap imitation." Yesterday, Google gleefully shared its evidence with internet journal SearchEngineLand.

Microsoft did not initially deny Google's damaging allegations outright, with Bing director Stefan Weitz burbling incomprehensibly: "We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. The over-arching 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."

Pushed for a straight answer by tech site ZDNet, Bing replied: "We do not copy Google's results."

A later blog post accused Google of using "a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking" before adding with a

swagger: "We'll take it as a back-handed compliment." ·