From Google Blog: Bing is copying Google Search results

In doing basic search optimization, I've always focused on Google results, yet mindful of the fact that Yahoo uses Bing to power their search results, and Yahoo still being a major part of search in the Philippines.

It's difficult enough to figure out the intricacies of the Google Search algorithm, but reading that Bing copies Google's search engine results just validates what I thought was the right thing to do. You optimize for Google, more or less you're optimized for Yahoo & Bing. It's not best practice, but it's what you resort to with clients who are not willing to pay the extra buck for more fine-tuned search optimization.

Read the story below, then read Bing's response: http://searchengineland.com/bing-admits-using-customer-search-data-says-google-pulled-spy-novelesque-stunt-63162

Tell me what you think.

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Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

2/01/2011 02:56:00 PM

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. 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.

This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking.

We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:


To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).


We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:


For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:


And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:


As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

• 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

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. 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.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. 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.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Microsoft Bing: 'Manifesto' launched

Microsoft Bing launched yesterday with a JWT ad called 'Manifesto'. Here's the ad to start with:






What did you think about the ad? Microsoft says the idea behind 'Manifesto' is to elicit an emotional response about a concept that is decidedly not emotional. It didn't for me. Fail.

What it looked like was a typical US ad -- a montage of people shots, a long running voice-over, and a long explanation on how we should be emotional about Microsoft's new product. Fail. Nothing visceral. All logic.

When will Microsoft ever learn?

Bing & Wolfram Alpha: New Ways to Search

As Google challenges the norm with it's upcoming Google Wave, Google is challenged by new approaches to search engines.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."

The Microsoft team working on Bing writes on www.decisionengine.com:

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

"Microsoft's Bing will change the face of search,"  Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk said in a blog post, "Bing focuses on delivering answers, not Web pages."

In what is a growing online search trend, Bing delves into websites to summarize what they have to offer in easily scanned preview boxes.

"We are trying to surface functionality right to the top so people don't have to look for it quite so hard," says Whitney Burk, director of communications for Bing. 

"They want to give you more information without having to click through to a lot of other sites," said Rosoff, who has used Bing during the past month as part of a Microsoft test program.

"I like it, but I don't think it will get me to switch from Google entirely. They are not naive to the scope of the challenge. They are going to keep throwing money at it for awhile.

Today, AdAge Digital called Bing "a Search Portal, not a Decision Engine," saying that "it's much better categorized as a "search portal." The idea of a search engine is to get you where you want to go fast, based on the queries you enter. The idea of a portal is to give you all the content you need so you don't have to go anywhere else. Bing is a hybrid, a search portal that lets you keep searching and refining your query without ever leaving the site until you absolutely have to."

A lot of skepticism from the community is coming out, but Cnet News, one of the few real hands-on testers came out with a positive review in a blog, "Microsoft Bing: Much Better than Expected."

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Another challenge to how we do search is Wolfram Alpha, created by Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram Alpha writes: Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Stephen Wolfram, creator, writes in his blog: "I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable. [...] But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it? [...] All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do. [...] I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!"

My take on this is that Google will not go away easily. Both Bing & Wolfram Alpha have their unique search purposes that may fit the needs of specific mindset when doing search.

While we wait this out to see how these developments will affect our net lives, my next question is how these developments will change search engine optimization. Do you have any thoughts on this?