Google has received some heavy criticism lately from people who work in the tech field about how they are handling the competition from Microsoft's search engine Bing. One of the things most often pointed to is the allegation that they have been copying some of the features that make Bing so special, like customizable background images.
But now, the tables have turned, and it looks as though Google has some compelling evidence that Bing is secretly using Google to power some of their search results. In fact, an article at SearchEngineLand talked about a “sting operation” led by Google where their claim proves that Bing watches Google's search results and uses them to improve their own.
Google claims that Bing is doing this by using the Bing toolbar and Internet Explorer 8 to keep an eye on how people use Google. Both Internet Explorer and the Bing toolbar send user data back to Microsoft.
It seems that Google started getting suspicious after noticing a few odd things about Bing's search results and they started wondering why there was so much similarity in the top search results between the two engines. Since the search engines are used by different people and appeal to different demographics, it seems unlikely that the top search results would be almost identical. To add further suspicion, the top search results were similar even when Google's results were considered to be mistakes in their ranking algorithm.
This made Google determined to find out what was going on.
To find out more, Google invented 100 unintelligible search queries like “jougmmhe” and then matched them to results that weren't at all related to the search query terms. These queries were sort of like marking bills. Because these pages weren't related to the query, there is no way that the pages would ordinarily have appeared in the search results.
Then, the company got several of its engineers to install Internet Explorer 8 by Microsoft, along with the Bing toolbar. They searched for the “special” terms and clicked on the links to the pre-specified unrelated result. After 20 or so engineers did this, they noticed that Bing started pointing people to the same pre-specified result much more often.
A long-time search industry analyst, Mr. Sullivan, also came to the same conclusion as the Google team. He wrote that “It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer.”
Bing says that they use more than 1,000 signals to decide search results, including clickstream data they get from their customers. Which means that basically they watch what people click when they visit Google.
The battle between Microsoft and Google has been going on for a long time, and is only getting more heated as each of them have entered the others' market. Google's web browser has been giving Internet Explorer a bigger run for its money than Firefox did in its first few years. And, not to be out-done Microsoft's new search engine Bing is gaining traction with IE users.
Google has always prided itself on providing the best and most relevant search results and they protected their algorithms fiercely. Which is why they are so successful at what they do and why even with Bing, they are still enjoying a 67% market share. But, it is certainly going to bother Google to know that Bing may be copying their top results.
What do you think about this situation? Do you prefer Bing or Google? Let me know in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for TechCareersBlog. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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