Saturday, September 22, 2012

Are Bing's search results really Bing's or are they Google's?

I know this is a little old (it happened a year ago), but I was reminded of this when we were discussing search engines, algorithms and stealing other companies' ideas during class.

Last year, Google claimed that Bing was copying their search results and posting it as their own.  Google first suspected that this was happening based on search results for a commonly misspelled word - "tarsorrhapy".  Google would show search results for both the correct spelling (tarsorrhapy) and incorrect spelling (torsoraphy).  They noticed that Bing did not have search results for the misspelling, but did so later in the year.  To prove whether Bing was really using Google's search results, Google created fake search queries and inserted a completely irrelevant web page as the top search result for that fake query. Bing denies the whole thing.

Now, over a year later, Bing is hosting a challenge (Bing it on) to see if users prefer Bing's search results over Google's.  This whole thing has turned into an interesting battle between the two. If you want to read more about how Google had posted fake search results and Bing's challenge test, click on the links below.


Google's blog on Bing using Google's search results and denying it
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

Bing Challenge
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/09/06/challenge-announce.aspx

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