Interesting, this new "war" between Google and Bing.

I had a dream that Google and Bing had a big fight and I was caught in the middle. I really did... a few days ago. Suddenly I woke up yesterday to the story that Google is accusing Bing of cheating. Fight!


Google revealed recently that it caught Bing copying it's search results. Yep, apparently it's possible. Google engineers ran a sting operation - that's so Miami Vice! - that caught Bing watching what people search for on Google and the sites that these people select from Google’s results. They claim that Bing then uses that information to improve it's own search listings. 


The interesting thing about this is that: Bing doesn’t deny this.


Hunh?! I know this isn't like a school test but shouldn't admitting that you copied get punished? After all, the apparent copying is potentially improving Bing’s relevance in the search wars. Google engineers are calling it the digital equivalent of Bing copying Google’s test papers during a test - ok, so apparently it is like a school test.


Here's Google's "test paper". Notice the misspelled word.

Now here's Bing's "test paper" with the same misspelled word.

Now for a more detailed explanation with all the geek-ese of how Google caught Bing, head over to Searchengineland. The short version is that Google created false links and search results which no-one would ever actually look for or find. So when Bing started to return these same results, Google waved for Teacher. 

Bing has a perfectly logical explanation why this happened.

Does anyone really care?