Is Bing copying Google’s search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no — and it’s stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing’s alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries — even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
“We created about 100 ‘synthetic queries’ — queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag],” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query.”
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
“We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results — i.e., the results we inserted,” Singhal said. “We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing.”
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google’s suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on…