A small war has erupted between Google and Bing. The former claims that Microsoft’s search platform is duplicating some of its search results by tracking the search habits of Internet Explorer users who have the Bing toolbar installed (with certain options enabled), whilst the latter profusely denies the charge. Google aren’t stopping there, though, and are aggressively releasing examples and statistics to back up their claim.
So is this some form of copyright infringement? Have Bing effectively stolen Google’s search algorithm, or is this all one big misunderstanding that’ll ebb away in time? Google feel they have a strong case, and have used some pretty strong, emotive language in their blog:
‘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.’
Bing’s immediate response was blunt, a company spokesperson seemingly not wishing to give the claims the time of day: “We do not copy Google’s results.” Feeling that this could be a massive PR disaster though, Bing have released a stronger statement outright denying the claims:
“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.”
We haven’t heard the last of this by a long shot. So what exactly is Google’s argument? Google’s initial interest was tickled when employees searched for a rare surgical procedure called ‘tarsorrhaphy’ which is, apparently, often misspelled. Searching in Google for ‘torsorophy’ brought back results for both the correct spelling and the inaccurate term, whilst Bing had no results for the misspelling at all. A few months on, though, and Bing were returning results for the misspelling without offering results for the correct term. The first result was identical to Google’s. Oo-er…
Google have done some more detailed investigations. They have purposely searched for terms with no results in either search engine before the ‘Bing Sting’, and manipulated irrelevant sites to show up for said terms. When searching for these terms on Google with the Bing toolbar in Internet Explorer, some of the terms seemed to magically appear. There’s no way these identical ‘fake’ results should have appeared in a natural search on Bing, Google seem to have a point…
Google effectively went undercover. We doubt Google would have launched such an offensive if they didn’t feel they had some undeniable proof of organic SEO shenanigans. A real clash of the titans, the next few days in SEO are going to be very interesting indeed!
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
