The Big Bing/Google Controversy

Is Microsoft resorting to copying Google? If you ask Google, Yes! Google first suspected foul play in May 2010 and by October of that year they went into sleuth mode and set up a sting operation to catch Bing, whose search results continued to closely mirror Google's.

Harry Shum, corporate vice president of Bing development stated that Bing was/is not copying Google search results but rather monitoring what people are searching for through a clickstream, or rather a sufstream.

This didn't quite explain the evidence derived from Google's sting operation. Google injected bogus results into its search engine i.e. fake queries and fake results that no user would generate. On December 20, 2010, test engineers ran the fixed queries with the Bing tool bar and on IE8 with Suggested Sites. Lo and behold, some of the bogus results began appearing on Bing.

The fact that Bing can monitor searches from ppeople who are using the Bing Toolbar or using Internet Explorer 8 with the Suggested Sites feature turned on seems fair game to Microsoft who noted that Bing isn't just monitoring Google but rather what people do as they travel across the Web.

So why is Google up in arms? Well, where do the majority of all searchers go? Google. And by monitoring search behavior, Bing can tell if the user went to Google to conduct a search, examine the URL string and even determine the exact phrase that was search for. But on the flip side, Bing can also monitor user behavior on their own search engine and examine how people click on its own search results. Bing further goes on to note that in October, around the time Google became suspicious, they rolled out a new ranking algorithm along with an experimental system, called "Aether," that allowed Bing to test changes in their ranking methodology.

The volleying between the two search engines could go on and on. What it all boils down to is who reigns as king of search and provides users with the most relevant search results? Google is still the top royal and Bing is trying hard to take the crown