The gloves have finally come off in the search engine wars. Yesterday, Google fired the first salvo at Microsoft, accusing its Bing service of blatantly pilfering search engine results from Google’s own results. Microsoft initially said “so what?” to the claim, then eventually shifted to the offensive as the day went on.
You can get the complete lowdown with Danny Sullivan’s very in depth article on Search Engine Land, but the gist of it is that Google set up a sort of sting operation at the end of 2010 to test their theory that Bing was using Google’s search results for their own.
To be clear, before the test began, these 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.
We can see why Google is upset here, especially after the flurry of articles questioning the quality of Google’s search results compared to Bing’s the past few weeks. It’s kind of shitty to have your work be repurposed by your competitor without credit or compensation. However, there doesn’t seem to be any actual illegal wrongdoing by Bing here. Plus, frankly as users, we don’t really care about who stole what as long as we get good search results. (Although it’ll make for some fun #teamgoogle and #teammicrosoft campaigning.)
As you can imagine, Sullivan’s article set off a flurry of responses from both Google and Microsoft reps, culminating with a good old fashioned Twitter Duel. If you love this stuff and want more details, check out the articles on Techmeme and within this post by a shellshocked MG Siegler from TechCrunch.
Obviously, we here at Lalawag love ourselves some catty nerd talk, having borne witness to a good one just last month. And wouldn’t you know it, our old pal Dave Winer is in the middle of this Twitter Duel too! Fortunately, he’s not the one ranting here; he just manages to spark some nice barbs from Frank Shaw at Microsoft and Matt Cutts from Google.
(Thanks to TechCrunch for collating these tweets.)
