Google Vs Bing – “Let’s Keep This Fight Clean, Gentlemen”

One week after the net exploded with news of Google’s “Bing Sting” and Microsoft’s subsequent vague roundabout answers (which later became a firm denial, which later became an explanation), we’re going to take you through what actually happened.

So Google caught its competitor with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar. And here’s how. (In very basic terms, for the non techie readers) In a nutshell: last summer, Google’s search results were showing up on Bing’s page after a minor time lag. Normally, that has nothing to do with anything except the web pages’ listing/ranking. However, these were no ordinary results, they were the results for misspelled queries!(images courtesy: googleblog.blogspot.com)

Lo and behold, the same result for said misspelled unusual query later on started showing up on Bing’s results without the corrected query as was the case with Google.

Short of employing super-sensitive psychics whose job it is to predict the correct spellings for a misspelled query AND then magically shovel out the same results as Google’s searches; there is no explanation for Bing’s results except they cheated.

Now Google, being the tech-savvy pirates they are, verified this by generating about a 100 “synthetic queries” (search queries that users would not type in, like hybbprqag) and linked with each a unique and unrelated web page as the top result. Imagine their surprise (I trust there was no dismay, just a victorious “Gotcha!” in their minds) when the same unrelated page later showed up as Bing’s top result for the same synthetic query.

Google topped off their Bing Sting accusation with a high handed “at Google we believe in innovation etcetera etcetera” sermon, which later prompted Microsoft’s denial. Initially, Bing said “We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results” which said nothing about anything, until it later became a categorical “We do not copy Google’s results.”
Here is an excerpt from Bing’s explanation later about their “multiple signals” for ranking search results.

“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.
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”

In other words, Bing says they get a small amount of their data from users, but they very neatly avoid stating where the rest of their data comes from. Kudos. Also, they’ve very wisely taken the tolerant wiser person approach, calling Google’s moves a “back-handed compliment from a smart competitor”.

Words, may I add, to talk around some very compelling evidence. Well, we don’t know how much of a compliment it really is, but here’s what our scoreboard looks like this: