Google has accused rival search engine Bing of copying its search results.
The accusation comes in the wake of a ‘sting’ operation, in which Google set up 100 dummy queries leading to pre-determined results pages. These queries were then entered by Google engineers into Google’s search engine running inside Internet Explorer with the Bing Toolbar active. The engineers were instructed to select the top result each time.
After two weeks, Bing was directing between 7 and 9 of the same 100 dummy queries to the same results within its search engine.
In a statement of behalf of Microsoft, Harry Shum, corporate vice president of Bing, did not directly deny the allegations. Mr Shum wrote that Bing does monitor ‘clickstream’ data from certain users who opt in to sharing it, and that this is a very small element of the thousand signals Bing users to determine results.
The implied admission is that in they case of certain users, Bing monitors what they click on when they conduct searches through Google.
Microsoft also referred to Google’s experiment as a ‘spy-novelesque stunt’ and an attempt to ‘confuse and manipulate’ this kind of data used by Bing.
This particular battle is part of an ongoing war between the two search engines to provide the most relevant search results, thereby attracting more users and with them more online advertising dollars.
