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Search Engine Land has published an article detailing a "sting operation" that has led Google to accuse Bing of cheating on its search results. As the story goes, last year Google noticed that its competitor was showing very similar top results for misspelled searches. Suspecting shenanigans, the search giant manually placed a bogus page as the top result for 100 synthetic searches that few, if any people would actually enter (queries like hiybbprqag).
For the top results, Google inserted pages with no relevance to the search queries, so it would be pretty damning if Bing started showing the same results. Google thought Microsoft might have been copying results from data sent by Internet Explorer users, so it had a group of engineers run the test queries from IE with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled. Sure enough, less than two weeks later, some of the obscure results began appearing on Bing.
Microsoft promptly responded to the allegations in a blog post, calling the story 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," the Bing team said. "We all learn from our collective customers, and we all should."
"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," Microsoft explained. Is the company truly cheating though? Some say Bing is leeching off Google's innovation while others see Bing as a clever underdog. Where do you stand?
User Comments: 31
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I remember reading few years ago that Google it self used four (I think, correct me if I am wrong please) different tools to track user surfing/searches:
- Google toolbar (which does pretty much the same as Bing Tool bar may be more who knows)
- Google Desktop
- Gmail
- Google web accelerator
Now if MS is using Bing Toolbar to track such data, I wonder how this exonerate Google of the same crime in the first place. I think such claptrap is coming norm in despicable way so I wouldn't bother with Google's shenanigans.
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Yup, if you hit Google docs, there's your Gmail address, staring you in the face.
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Well something even worse is, Google's toolbar has pretty damn good 'spying' capabilities built into it, which would continue to send every search you do (even the one executed on other search engines like Bing/Yahoo etc.), or every url you visit (with complete address down to even the picture(s) you may see on that page) to the Google even when you've disabled it ........ I couldn't find anything whether Google have corrected this, but frankly I doubt that they will do it. Now I've never installed any toolbars as such on any of my PCs/, and I am baffled that what kind of people would do it and for what reasons.
Note: Also, now that they have their own browser, I wouldn't be surprised if something of this sort is actually is in-built into it.
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Captain, your avatar look much more funnier on cell
Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk
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I tested it. I tried putting in the same nonsense words in both searches, and I got different results.
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macgyver56 said:
I believe Google. They created a very nice test case to determine whether Bing is 'sucking' results off Google. Based on the setup and the outcome, Bing does not seem to be truly searching the internet. They're searching other search engines. Might as well cut out the middleman and just use Google.
Actually, they're tweaking their findings based on data sent in voluntarily by IE users. No doubt Google does the same with clicks by Chrome users, whether or not they make that user feedback voluntary the way Microsoft does with its feedback.
I've never been a big fan of Microsoft, with their predatory practices, and I rarely use IE - but geez, people, pick your battles. Or are you saying Google ignores click-thru data from IE users? Once you set up an outlier sting, as Microsoft described it, how many clicks would it take to link those nonsense letters to a site? Any ten Google partisans with copies of IE set to send data to Bing who knew about the "sting" wouldn't need genuine users to make the connection for Bing. There probably weren't any, not with that unlikely search term.
Looks to me like a Google con job, not a "very nice test," and I don't see how Google comes out of this looking better than Microsoft. Just looks like sleazy PR to me.
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