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Google says Microsoft’s Bing is copying its search results

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Google is accusing Microsoft’s Bing of copying its search results.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning:

I’m about to be on a panel with Bing and ask them how http://goo.gl/m3IWc on Google showed up as http://goo.gl/CTjsE on Bing

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The two images that Cutts tweeted, shown above this post, gets to the point which SearchEngineLand first reported Tuesday morning.

Google says it can prove that Bing has watched what people search for on Google and tailored its results to mirror the leader in Web search, according to SearchEngineLand.

Harry Shum, Bing’s corporate vice president, wrote a blog post Tuesday morning addressing the SearchEnglineLand story without denying that Bing monitors some Google user activity, but rather saying that it monitors all sorts of Web user habits to improve Bing’s results. Shum wrote:

We woke up to an interesting (and interestingly timed) article by Danny Sullivan about some complaints Google has about how it says Bing ranks results,’ Shum wrote. ‘The Bing engineering team has been working hard over the past couple of years to deliver the best search relevance and quality in the industry and for our users. This is our top priority every day. We 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. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

Shum was on the panel that Cutts mentioned in his tweet Tuesday morning at the Big Think Farsight conference in San Francisco.

During the panel, Cutts accused Bing of using Google search data for improving its search results.

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Shum, a former college professor of Cutts’, said he resented being called a ‘cheat’ and again stated that Bing is just using the data its customers make available online to build up its search algorithm, just as Google does, according to a recap of the panel posted on the Big Think Website.

Rich Skrenta, the chief executive of the Blekko (a search engine that uses crowd-sourced input to filter out spam), was also on the panel. Skrenta said the problem is there are only two dominant search engines left on the Web and that there should be more options.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

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Images: Screenshots taken by Google in its accusations of search result copying. Credit: Matt Cutts/Google

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