In an amazing post by Danny Sullivan , which details how Bing watches what people search on Google, 
copies it & uses the information to improve its own results. Of course Microsoft denies it.. but what was novel was the spy hunt by Google to caught Bing red handed. It all started with “tarosorraphy” which is a medical term for a rare surgical procedure on eyes, which was Googled in the summer of 2010 & was quirky enough to get Google’s attention. They corrected it , but what was peculiar was that Bing displayed the first correct result of Google without even a correction of spelling. As the official Google blog states -
The cycle continued with Bing displaying all types of unusual queries from Google. The Google started a hypothetical experiment to catch Bing in the act. This involved Google to insert 100 synthetic queries with random results in the Google search engine & then testing whether they appear in the Bing results or not. For example – “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” they inserted a credit union website link.
Then they issued fresh laptops with IE8 installed with toolbar & searched for them. And voila, the results started to appear in Bing, which confirms the suspicion that -
which as Google states is a cheap imitation & encourages to use Google as a primary search provider.
copies it & uses the information to improve its own results. Of course Microsoft denies it.. but what was novel was the spy hunt by Google to caught Bing red handed. It all started with “tarosorraphy” which is a medical term for a rare surgical procedure on eyes, which was Googled in the summer of 2010 & was quirky enough to get Google’s attention. They corrected it , but what was peculiar was that Bing displayed the first correct result of Google without even a correction of spelling. As the official Google blog states - Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.
The cycle continued with Bing displaying all types of unusual queries from Google. The Google started a hypothetical experiment to catch Bing in the act. This involved Google to insert 100 synthetic queries with random results in the Google search engine & then testing whether they appear in the Bing results or not. For example – “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” they inserted a credit union website link.
Then they issued fresh laptops with IE8 installed with toolbar & searched for them. And voila, the results started to appear in Bing, which confirms the suspicion that -
- Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
- The Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program
which as Google states is a cheap imitation & encourages to use Google as a primary search provider.
Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.Also, they expect to have a fair competition.. with Microsoft..
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
Comments