Google Says Microsoft Caught Cheating
File this one under the heading: No, they really don't like each other. Really.
As morning broke on Tuesday, Google and Microsoft were busy trading charges and denials about cheating
Danny Sullivan, who curates a widely-read blog focusing on the search business, published a piece about a sting operation conducted by Google.
Google says that its suspicions were initially raised after noticing that typos - which its search team would correct - would get reproduced on Bing pointing to the same search results without correcting the typo. According to Sullivan, Google believed the results confirmed its suspicion that Microsoft's Bing search service "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."
"I've spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine," Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine's ranking algorithm, told Sullivan. "I've got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book."
But a Microsoft spokesman later told our sister site ZDNet that the charges had no merit. "We do not copy Google's results," the company said in a terse statement sent to ZDNet.
What a wonderful prelude to a conference on the future of search that's scheduled to start today in San Francisco.