Google and Bing in war of words
Maggie Shiels
All day Tuesday search giant Google traded barbs with search upstart Bing, owned and operated by the world's biggest software company, Microsoft.
At the heart of this dispute is a claim by Google that Bing has been watching what people search for on Google and then taking those results and using them to improve the results that Bing dishes up to users.
"I've got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book," Google fellow Amit Singhal told the industry blog SearchEngineLand.com.
"It's cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work. I don't know what else to call it but plain and simply cheating," said Mr Singhal.
The issue started back in the summer of 2010 when Google said it was looking at search queries for an unusual misspelled query. In this case it was the word torsorophy which should have been spelled tarsorrhaphy - and is in actual fact a rare surgical procedure on eyelids.
In a lengthy blog post, Mr Singhal who oversees Google's ranking algorithm said "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. This was very strange. How could they return our first result to users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query."
Google said at that point, it smelled a rat.
"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."
Mr Singhal said the company then embarked on an experiment or a sting operation to test out their suspicions that "Microsoft was really using Google's search results in Bing's ranking".
Google created about 100 "synthetic queries" that there was no way on earth users would type. For example hiybbprqag or delhipublicschool40 chdjob or juegosdeben1ogrande - that would be gobbledigook to you and me.
Google said each time it attached a wrong result to these nonsensical queries, Bing delivered the same results.
Hours after a story about the whole issue appeared in SearchEngineLand, Microsoft fired back in retaliation.
In defence, Bing's corporate vice president Dr Harry Shum explained in a blog post:
"[W]e use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.
"To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today's story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a back handed compliment."
So neither an outright admission nor a denial.
At a conference in San Francisco, Google and Bing came face to face at an event organised by Microsoft to discuss the future of search.
During the Big Think Farsight Conference, Google's Matt Cutts and Bing's Dr Shum traded a few insults over the issue.
Mr Cutts levelled the cheating claim at Bing while Dr Shum also went for the jugular accusing Google of profiting from spam sites.
Meanwhile over on Twitter, Microsoft's communication head Frank Shaw cranked things up when he tweeted his view on why Google embarked on the sting operation and why it decided to go public with the results.
The tech blog TechCrunch has them staked up, but in one Mr Shaw tweeted:
"Don't be fooled. Google wants to change the subject because they're under investigation in the US and Europe for manipulating search results."
This contretemps looks like it is destined to get a lot uglier.
Interestingly enough, Rich Skrenta the chief executive of the Blekko search engine, which has been written about here, also took part in the conference. He said this issue pointed to a bigger problem which was that there are only two dominant search engines left on the web and that there should be more options.
With Yahoo's search results now being delivered by Bing, this of course is where Blekko comes in.
Credit: BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)
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