Report: Bing is copying Google search results

Google is accusing Bing of copying Google's search results, according to a report from SearchEngineLand.com.

The Tuesday report said Google has been tracking Bing search results for misspelled search terms. It found Bing returned the same resultsGoogle did for the corrected terms. Google went as far as to conduct a sting operation where Google purposely seeded search results for gibberish terms that returned no results, such as "hiybbprqag," according to SearchEngineLand.com.

The company believes that Microsoft was using the Bing search bar and a "recommended sites" feature on Internet Explorer 8 to track searches done on Google, and then copying those results in Bing.

At the Farsight search conference in the San Francisco Bay area today, a top Google engineer confirmed that it has been inserting fake search results and said it had caught Microsoft copying the results.

"It?s almost like a mapmaker that inserts a fake street and sees if that street gets copied or if a Yellow Pages inserts a fake number," said Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google.

Cuttsshared the stage with Harry Shum, a corporate vice president from Microsoft Bing, and the two began arguing back and forth.

Shum didn't deny that the Bingbar orIE8 features track data, but he said all search engines track customer behavior. "We learn from our customers," Shum said. "We have been very clear we use customer data. My understanding is other search engines also use a similar thing."

Cutts countered,"I?m not sure users realize that by installing the Bing bar or install suggested sites on IE8 that those results are encrypted and sent to Microsoft."

It's an interesting public relations fight. Google has been suffering from criticism over privacy concerns that it is tracking what people search for. With this story, Google is now trying to shift the reputation of creepy tracking to Bing and Microsoft.

Here is the full story from SearchEngineLand.com with screenshots and specific search examples that Google cited as evidence.

Here is the official corporate line from each side:

Google sent out a statement form Amit Singhal, Google Fellow: "At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there, from Bing and others ? algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results copied from a competitor."

Microsoft has posted a blog item from Harry Shum that said: "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."

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