Over at the excellent Search Engine Land blog, editor Danny Sullivan detailed a sting operation which Google’s search team planted to test their hypothesis that Microsoft’s competing search engine, Bing, has been secretly copying Google search results to improve its own performance.
In the article, Danny presents evidence of several “synthetic” (fake/nonsense) search terms which the Google team planted specific search results for into its index of the web. These search terms, such as hiybbprqag, mbzrxpgjys and indoswiftjobinproduction were inserted into the Google search database, and set to return a single unrelated site, such as a seating chart on a theatre tickets site.
Several Google engineers were then instructed to search these synthetic terms from their homes, using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) with the Bing toolbar installed. The evidence they saw within a few days was damning: those fake searches (which Bing couldn’t know about, because they weren’t real) were returning exactly the fake results that Google inserted into its sting program.
A screenshot of a Bing search for hiybbprqag, one of the synthetic search terms Google used in its sting operation
The Google Fellow responsible for the internet giant’s search ranking algorithm, Amit Singhal, told Search Engine Land, “I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine. I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”
Microsoft responded to Search Engine Land’s questions about its alleged practice, and didn’t deny the technique, which on the face of it seems to suggest that Microsoft’s IE browser and/or Bing Bar watch every search users make on Google, and report those results back to Microsoft.
Is Microsoft cheating? And if major Chinese search and internet properties such as Baidu are not already doing the same, how long will it take for them to add their own snoop code to the ubiquitous toolbars and desktop widgets which number in the dozens on the average Chinese mainland PC?