Microsoft has denied stealing internet results from rival Google, defending itself on a blog post saying that Google took part in the same types of activities used by spammers in order to accuse it of stealing those results.
The defence comes just one day after Google anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts said at a Bing-sponsored event that Microsoft was copying Google search results by watching what people search for on the Internet Explorer toolbar.
The company even set up tests that used fake results pages for random search queries, and then had 20 engineers search on those terms with the Internet Explorer toolbar. Cutts said those same results showed up on Bing shortly afterwards.
“I’ve been doing search for a decade and never seen anything like this,” Cutts said at the event.
But Microsoft senior vice president of online services Yusuf Mehdi has said in a blog post that “we do not copy results from any of our competitors… full stop”.
Instead, Mehdi says Microsoft looks at anonymous click stream data as just one of a thousand inputs used in the search algorithms. He in turn has attacked Google for engaging in a type of “honeypot” attack.
“In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results.”
“As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.”
Mehdi accuses Google of being scared of Bing, which has been growing slowly but constantly over the past two years.
“In October 2010 we released a series of big, noticeable improvements to Bing’s relevance. So big and noticeable that we are told Google took notice and began to worry. Then a short time later, here come the honeypot attacks.”
Mehdi doesn’t go so far as to say Google has copied Bing’s strategies, but does say that it will leave it up to the market to decide whether Bing is doing something right.
However, Google hit back at that defence. Google fellow Amit Singhal wrote in a lengthy blog post, complete with screenshots, that Bing is using a combination of the Internet Explorer 8 browser and the Bing toolbar to imitate Google’s own algorithm.
“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.”
“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.”
Jim Stewart, chief executive of SEO firm Stewart Media, says he doesn’t see any benefits for Google in revealing what Bing is possibly doing and suggests it could be that the internet giant is becoming nervous.
“I’m just wondering what they gain from outing Bing like this. Awhile ago they would have just shrugged their shoulders and said ‘Oh well’”.
“It could just be nerds getting angry, but it may be that Google is reacting to Bing’s market share gaining in the US.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
