Bing Search Engine: I'm putting half a million dollars on Lucky Dan to win, third race at Riverside Park

More understandable headline: Google Claims Bing Is Cheating By Copying Its Search Results and Claiming Them As Its Own

It would appear that Google ran a little sting operation on Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test...

...Around late May of last year, Google told me it began noticing that Bing seemed to be doing exceptionally well at returning the same sites that Google would list, when someone would enter unusual misspellings...

...Google began to strongly suspect that Bing might be somehow copying its results, in particular by watching what people were searching for at Google. There didn’t seem to be any other way it could be coming up with such similar matches to Google, especially in cases where spelling corrections were happening.

Google thought Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was part of the equation. Somehow, IE users might have been sending back data of what they were doing on Google to Bing. In particular, Google told me it suspected either the Suggested Sites feature in IE or the Bing toolbar might be doing this...

...When the [sting] was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing...

...before the test began, the [test] queries found either nothing or a few poor quality results on Google or Bing. Then Google made a manual change, so that a specific page would appear at the top of these searches, even though the site had nothing to do with the search. Two weeks after that, some of these pages began to appear on Bing for these searches.

It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer...

While Google isn't ecstatic at Microsoft's tactics, it's not clear that what they're doing is illegal or in violation of the software end-user agreements. That said, it just... smells funny.

It would seem the right thing to do, the ethical thing for Microsoft to do, is to adjust its misspelling strategy -- using its own algorithms and not piggybacking on Google.