Google has recently accused Bing of copying some of Google’s search results. Google has been keeping an eye on what they called “synthetic queries”, which are test search queries that connect a word that you would never expect someone to type into the search to a site that has no ties with the word in the search – and usually the word isn’t an actual word. Eventually, when they searched for the same word on Bing, however, Google found the same results appearing as if searching from their own site.
In Google’s blog post they said that it began with the word “tarsorrhaphy,” which is a surgical procedure for the eyelids; however, the word was misspelled “torsorophy,” so Google fixed the search so that you would be able to search the correct spelling or the result would pop up for it. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling of that word. But later in the summer, Google searched for it again and found that they (Bing) had the misspelled word in their results, and without even offering the correct spelling. Google began to wonder: How could they return their first result without the correct spelling of the word? And, if they had, couldn’t they have given an assortment of other relevant results for the correct query?
Over the next few months, Google kept a close watch on Bing, noticing that even other URLs from their results were appearing in Bing, and with a frequency that continued to increase for all types of queries. This is when Google came up with the idea to experiment with “synthetic queries,” and thus conceived about 100 different queries for investigation.
For example, one of these words would be jeugosdeben1ogrande, and the results for searching that query would be hip-hop bling jewelry, or as it comes up in the result, a “Dookie Rope Chains.” Honestly, this is a pretty funny “synthetic query,” considering the fact that someone actually had to find and connect the site to the query, and it sounds pretty ridiculous.
But according to Google’s blog post, the experiment confirmed their suspicions of Bing using IE8 and the Bing toolbar, which allows them to send data to themselves about what people search for on Google and the search results they ultimately click. This explains why Bing has been coming up with the same results when searching the same queries. So, here is what Google had to say about that: “Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation”.
You might call those fighting words, but Google truly does have a whole excess of evidence to back up their suspicions. Microsoft isn’t going to take this lightly, and we’re sure to hear more about Microsoft’s side of the story. How do you think this will end?