Redmond, Washington — Following Tuesday’s fracas over whether Microsoft was accumulating search results from rival Google, sparking the latest Microsoft-versus-Google brouhaha, a Bing executive is not letting it go: “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior VP of its Online Services Division, said in a post on Bing’s community blog titled “Setting the record straight.”
Google on Tuesday grabbed headlines in the tech media by disclosing an FBI-like sting operation purporting to produce evidence that Bing is intentionally and systematically copying Google search results.
Today, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for Microsoft’s Online Services Division, fired back. Mehdi expressed that Google’s sting, in fact, was “fabricated to manipulate Bing search results” through the use of click fraud — the elaborate trickery scammers use to fake clicks on Web ads in order to get paid by advertisers.
“What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove?” asks Mehdi. “Nothing anyone in the industry does not already know.”
Mehdi, in a blog post Wednesday, suggested the effort by Google was little more than a publicity stunt, saying it was “interesting to watch the level of protest and feigned outrage from Google.”
“We do not copy results from any of our competitors,” Mehdi wrote. “Period. Full stop.”
“We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting,” Mehdi said.
Mehdi went on to reflect some of the statements made by Harry Shum, Microsoft’s head of core search development, during the company’s Farsight event. Shum had discussed allegations on stage with Google’s head of Web spam, Matt Cutts; Mehdi outlined how Bing made use of anonymous click stream data, along with “more than a thousand inputs” to create Bing’s ranking algorithm.
Google alleges Microsoft was able to observe and imitate those results by using common features in Microsoft software installed on users’ computers.
“Some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results — a cheap imitation,” Google’s senior engineer Amit Singhal wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Microsoft executives do not deny that Bing produced the same results for some of those search terms. But Microsoft says the same results showed up on Bing in less than 10% of the search terms in Google’s experiment and that Microsoft relies on 1,000 “signals” to shape its Bing search results.
“If we were copying it would be 100 out of 100,” said Adam Sohn, a Microsoft spokesman.
Mehdi ended the post by stating that the company would continue to focus on innovating the product, though added a jab about the timing of Google’s honeypot discovery, saying it was directly related to some of Microsoft’s recent improvements to Bing, which were “so big and noticeable that we are told Google took notice and began to worry,” Mehdi said.