Official Google Blog: Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

Google runs a sting operation on Bing because Microsoft has been copying Google search results in Bing. I love the technique they use: synthetic query results for nonsense terms.

To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

The question here is whether search results — which are free and freely accessed — can be ‘stolen’ or ‘misappropriated’?

In one sense, Google is mining our social gestures — like the links that we create, or the clicks we make on search results offered to us — using their own algorithms, and returning the non-proprietary results.

So, is it legitimate for Bing to include Google search results in it’s own algorithm? 

Here we see the pathological edge case, which is nonsense terms that are basically almost never typed into a search box, and clearly in that case, Bing is opting to show the Google result if there is one.

But what about the real use cases? When a user types in ‘size 6 Van’s skate shoes’ or ‘Peewee Herman’? Is it legitimate for Bing to include search results from Google in it’s calculations of relevance?

My bet is that most people would judge this to be a bit iffy, if not unethical, even though the search results are freely available.