San Francisco — The battle of the biggies have once again heated up, with Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, on Tuesday accused its arch rival Microsoft Corp.’s Bing of “copying” its search query results, even gibberish queries, the latest salvo in the competition between the two technology behemoths, an accusation to which Microsoft denied and said the data in question comes from customers.
Officials from Google and Microsoft disputed at an event over Google’s accusation that Microsoft copies Google search results and feeds them into its Bing search engine. The search and advertising monopolist made the claim Tuesday after releasing the results of a test it carried out purporting to show how Google’s results for search terms were copied weeks later by Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
One of the Google’s top search technologists, Amit Singhal, who helps oversee Google’s search engine algorithm, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined this: Bing cheating, copying Google results.”
Google claims an experiment discovered URLs from Google searches turned up on Bing and proved Microsoft is mining Google search results. Microsoft called Google’s experiment a stunt and a “backhanded compliment.” The software maker said that Google implanted obscure results on its search algorithm to try to prove that Bing was imitating its results.
Google’s anti-webspam technologist Matt Cutts, charged Microsoft on stage at a Bing-sponsored event of reproducing Google’s search query results by watching what people search for using its Internet Explorer 8 browser and toolbar, which send details of “clicks” back to Microsoft when users accept certain settings on the Microsoft software, Cutts added.
In fact, Cutts indicated that Google suspects that much of Bing’s popularity have come from copying Google. To test this hypothesis, Google hand-coded random search results for a series of nonsensical query terms, sent 20 engineers home to search on those terms using a computer with the IE8 toolbar, and weeks later discovered that when entered on Bing, these queries yielded the same dummy responses, Cutss said.
“We proved that,” Cutts said. “Our suspicion is that click data from the tool bar is not just for synthetic queries but for very many search queries.”
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Bing’s result’s weeks later:
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“We manually generated about 100 ‘synthetic queries’ — queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as the one in screenshot above [hiybbprqag],” said Google Fellow Singhal. “As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query.”
“We asked these engineers to enter the hand-coded queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results — i.e., the results we inserted,” Singhal said. “We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing.”
The issue was first brought forth Tuesday morning by the Search Engine Land technology news blog, whose editor Danny Sullivan was personally informed by Google on the issue in recent days.
According to Sullivan’s article, Google sensed some suspicion that Microsoft is using some combination of techniques, which can send its top search results for certain queries several months ago and recently ran a “sting” operation to find out if this was in fact happening.
“Our experiment has concluded that Bing is copying Google web search results,’ Singhal said. “At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there, from Bing and others — algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results copied from a competitor.”
Later on Tuesday, at the event “Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box“, sponsored by Big Think and Microsoft, Google anti-webspam engineer Cutts opened a panel discussion by outlining the accusation and invited comments from fellow panelist Harry Shum, a Microsoft vice president.
Shum did not deny that Microsoft was watching what people searched on and clicked on in Google.
He further said: “My argument is that when users use search engines, they are actually willing to share the data. We are collectively using the data to improve the search engine,” Shum said. “Everyone does this, Matt.”
Cutts shot back, “We do not use clicks on Bing in Google’s ranking.”
Needless to say, Cutts and Shum then got into a back and forth with Cutts pressing the issue and Shum rejecting the allegation.
Meanwhile, Microsoft furnished an e-mailed statement from Bing Director Stefan Weitz in which he downplays the Google accusation.
“We do not copy Google’s search results. We utilize multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. The prevailing goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites.”
In a Microsoft blog, Shum called Google’s accusation “a spy-novelesque stunt to create extreme outliers in tail query ranking” that does not accurately portray how Microsoft uses “opt-in customer data” to refine its search experience.