Microsoft isn’t taking Google’s allegations lying down. On Wednesday, Google accused Bing of copying its search results. In response, Microsoft is making allegations of its own against Google.
Google offered sophisticated experiment results that it says prove 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.
Microsoft not only denied the allegations, but now the software giant is fighting back with some juicy accusations of its own: Clickjacking.
Accusing Google of Clickjacking
“We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Service Division. “We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.”
Mehdi went on to say that Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, he explained, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.”
“That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak-and-dagger click fraud prove?” Mehdi asked. “Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know.”
He went on to reiterate that Microsoft uses click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.”
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