Blog request by @iantearle

Get your own algorithm

Bing (the Microsoft search engine) has this week been directly accused of copying Googles search algorithms, after suspicious Google set ‘traps’ for the search engine, queries like “hiybbraqag” and “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” and indexed ‘sting’ sites in the top position for these phrases, to see if Bing would indeed do the same.

Whoops (click to enlarge)

Oh dear. On that evidence it didn’t look good for Bing, both Google and Microsoft issued statements:

Google said:

“… some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation. At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. 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.”

Microsoft then said:

“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.”

I found this interesting picture on how the ‘sting’ worked.

The main point here is, Bing have done nothing ‘illegal’ according to lawyers from Google and that actually, other than public ridicule, nothing can be done at this point.

I’ve seen a few articles for myself that defend both sides, it doesn’t look great and ‘no smoke without fire’ etc but also, nothing is sacred when it comes to search engine wars. (And we all use Google, right?!)

Adam’s verdict = We should all use Google