Google, Bing reps speak out on today's 'copying search results' claims

Earlier today I posted about the Search Engine Land article that outed Bing as allegedly copying Google's search engine results.

Now, representatives from Google have spoken out on the topic. Most notably, Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who wrote the blog entry "Microsoft's Bing uses Google search results--and denies it," posted to The Official Google Blog here.

Singhal's claims echo those noted by Danny Sullivan in the Search Engine Land article, namely that Google, sensing Bing might be copying some of its results, planted false, unrelated search results for obscure search phrases to see if Bing's results would follow suit. Only weeks later many did, pushing Singhal to note: "However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google."

Bing has said little about the claim, initially dodging the question with an overtly politically correct answer, then a more contrite one: "We do not copy Google’s results," as noted in a ZD Net article by Mary Jo Foley.

Bing Corporate Vice President Harry Shum later added some comments in a Bing Community Search Blog entry:

"We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

So who's right? It's tough to deny Google's evidence and, for those paying attention, Bing certainly has a PR issue on its hands, as exploited by Singhal himself:

"So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop."

hiybbprqag. mbzrxpgjys...Google accuses Bing of cheating

hiybbprqag. mbzrxpgjys.

These are search phrases, planted by Google, designed to see if Bing would copy its search results. Neither phrase showed results on Google or Bing prior to the plant. Google adjusted its code to show a manual ranking for the phrases, and found that Bing's results followed suit soon after, as noted in a ground-breaking Search Engine Land article this morning:

"For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls “synthetic” searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google...

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing."

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan did an excellent job on the research and article, which you can find here. As noted in the article, Google has accused Bing of cheating by copying its results, and takes offense to the move. Bing has yet to deny the claim, offering instead a response that would make a politician proud.

It will be interesting to hear Bing's response to the accusations and if/how this will affect Bing's results going forward.