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February 02 2011
Google’s ‘Bing Sting’ Suggests Microsoft’s Search Engine Plays Dirty
Following a spy-novelesque stunt dubbed the Bing Sting, Google has denounced Microsoft for stealing its search results–and Bing’s reaction is nothing short of ambiguous.
Google reportedly got suspicious after it found that Bing’s search results replicated misspelled words from its own results, so the company decided to run a test by linking fake search results to nonsense search terms–and Bing took the bate.
Quoting Google software engineer Amit Singhal, the BBC reports:
“A search for ‘hiybbprqug’ on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page,” he said…. “We noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency,” he went on.
Bing’s reaction to the Google accusation is quite ambiguous: it refutes Google’s words at times, but seems to make excuses for itself at others. From the BBC:
Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: “We do not copy Google’s search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search ...
