Google copied by Bing: the leaders of Mountain View accuse Microsoft of copying search results from Google. However, from Redmond headquarters, the plagiarism accusation is denied, while admitting that many factors contribute to shaping the SERPs.
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A bomb has exploded in the world of search engines: Google has publicly accused Bing of copying from its own search results.
By now the evidence is clear to everyone: Google – as a search engine – seems to have no rivals and Bing, despite promising beginnings, does not seem to take off.
The person openly commenting on this is Amit Singhal, one of the creators of the Google ranking algorithm. Suspicious of too many “coincidences” in the return of search results on Bing, practically the same ones appearing on Google, Singhal devised a plan to verify whether it was true.
The coincidence of several results in the SERPs, apparently, was possible because Bing allegedly used a technical trick embedded in the Bing toolbar capable of “capturing” the search results of users who moved from Google to Bing. Valuable information that could have been “recycled” by Microsoft’s engine to create SERPs too similar to Google’s. What caught the eyes of Google developers was the presence of such “coincidences” even when there were typos in the query of interest.
At this point, having noticed the excessive coincidences, Amit Singhal decided to run a test: associate to a completely meaningless query – “mbzrxpgjys” – specific results on Google.
The experiment involved using about twenty notebooks on which the Bing Toolbar was installed; having done that, the engineers involved in this research began typing the predetermined meaningless queries, clicking on the search results offered by Google. In the case of the query “mbzrxpgjys” the RIM Company website was set as the first result.
Well, after about two weeks from the start of the experiment, the same “fake” search results also appeared on Bing (as shown in the photo attached to this article), deliberately created to conduct this particular study.
All this confirmed to Amit Singhal that Google that there is indeed a system used by Bing to “clone” the SERPs, or at least the top results.
Singhal’s comment on the matter was terse: “I have spent my career building a good engine. I have no problem with competitors developing innovative algorithms but copying is not innovation as far as I’m concerned.”
On its part, Microsoft – through Stefan Weitz – initially stated that it uses various indicators to build its SERPs (did he perhaps mean that some “advice” from Google is indeed gleaned?), then categorically denied the plagiarism accusation: “We do not copy Google’s results,” as can be read on the ZDNet pages.
The situation seems apparently clear, although it is conceivable that the matter will not stop at this experiment. It almost feels like a ruthless competition game from old post-war spy films: who will prevail?
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