February 11, 2011 – After operating their own CSI-like sting, Google claims that Microsoft’s search product, Bing, is copying their indexed search results as their own. Microsoft says they aren’t doing anything wrong. 

Search Engine Land brought this interesting piece of news to our attention in their article, “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” Basically, the sting involved Google creating “one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term,” then wire those results for particular, highly obscure search. With the hand coding, typing those search terms would produce recognizable Web pages in Google results that wouldn’t show in search results otherwise. Google employees typed in those search terms from home using Internet Explorer with both sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Before the experiment, neither Bing nor Google returned the hand-coded results, but two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded. 

Google states they like competition with innovation, not copiers. Microsoft says they use collective intelligence from a variety of sources and users.  

Time will tell if this triggers Microsoft to make any changes. Google says they just want them to stop this practice. 

Melody K. Smith 

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.