“Cheating” accusation by Google about Microsoft

At the start of February there was extensive news coverage and online discussion following Google’s accusation that Microsoft had been “cheating”, by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. This debate is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims about each of their search engine practices.

The story was first broken on Search Engine Land, and stated that Google ran a “sting” operation against Microsoft, catching them using some unique search data that had been set up by Google to check their suspicion that Bing was taking people’s search activity from Google and using that data to improve their own search engine’s listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that they use ‘multiple signals and approaches’, which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They counter that accusation by stating that this was just a stunt by Google to take focus away from the event that Microsoft was simultaneously holding to discuss the “Future of Search”.

The author of the article subsequently stated that both companies approached him to discuss the issue, but remains convinced that the timing of Google’s accusation was purely coincidental. He says that undoubtedly, “both Google and Bing play the PR game” and “what’s happening right now is that there’s a perfect storm of various developments all coming together at the same time”.

He concluded by saying that he sympathises with Google’s opinion that Bing is “doing something it shouldn’t” and that Bing should be truly independent and not use Google as “a tuning fork”. He also states that as a result of Bing’s alleged data mining of Google’s searches, its name now, jokingly, stands for “Bing Is Now Google”.

If you’d like to know more about this story and how it might affect your search engine rankings, please contact us for details.

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