IT Support | Google Says Microsoft Is Stealing Search Results.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Tue, Feb 08, 2011
Matt Cutts:
First off, let me say that I respect all the people at Bing. From engineers to evangelists, everyone that I’ve met from Microsoft has been thoughtful and sincere, and I truly believe they want to make a great search engine too. I know that they work really hard, and the last thing I would want to do is imply that Bing is purely piggybacking Google.
Earlier that week on the Twitter, Matt Cutts pointed to a blog post that talked about an undercover sting operation by Googler's to show that Bing was stealing Google search results. They did so by doing meaningless queries to results they had set up themselves. Here are a few pictures. Pretty damning evidence, No? Cutts even confronted the Bing team during a live streamed conference he had the next day. It was pretty awkward. Bing said they do not copy their results.
They responded.
We do not copy results from any of our competitors. 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.
We do look at anonymous click stream data as one of more than a thousand inputs into our ranking algorithm. We learn from our customers as they traverse the web, a common practice in helping to improve a wide array of online services. We have been clear about this for a couple of years.
The short of it is that Microsoft learns from your click-data while you use IE. If you're inputting information into a Google Toolbar while in Internet Explorer, it will learn from that. It will learn what your searching for - and finding - and will use that for Bing. The problem was that Google created some results that would make Bing look really, really, bad. It made it look like they were outright copying results from Google. But is that the case?
Microsoft has said that it lays our these items in their Terms & Conditions when you use Internet Explorer. What do you think - is that copying? We can chat about it over a free IT Support Quote!
