Google Says Bing Cheated Copying Our Search Results

Google Says Bing Cheated Copying Our Search Results There’s a developing story here. The search giant, Google, says on its official blog that its rival search engine owned by Microsoft is copying its search results on queries.

Bing, which also powers Facebook search as well as Yahoo! search, is allegedly using Google web search results to improve its own search ranking for various queries.

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

Google claims not into prejudice after they conducted an experiment that shows and proves their suspicions on the “silly” activity to be stronger. One of which is the creation of “synthetic queries” that returns no results at all. Google manipulated the results of those “synthetic queries” in which they inserted unique webpage for each query that has nothing to do with it; in other words, completely irrelevant result for a particular query. Google defines “synthetic queries” as something you can’t expect a user will search for it.

For example, consider a search for torsoraphy, which causes Google to return this:

In the example above, Google’s searched for the correct spelling – tarsorrhaphy – even though torsoraphy was entered. Notice the top listing for the corrected spelling is a page about the medical procedure at Wikipedia.

Over at Bing, the misspelling is NOT corrected – but somehow, Bing manages to list the same Wikipedia page at the top of its results as Google does for its corrected spelling results:

Got it? Despite the word being misspelled – and the misspelling not being corrected – Bing still manages to get the right page from Wikipedia at the top of its results, one of four total pages it finds from across the web. How did it do that?