Amit Singhai, a Google search fellow has complained via Twitter that Bing is copying Google's search results. While this has yet to go to court, it appears that Google are launching the first part of an investigation into theft claims.

Google has apparently planted obscure results on its search engine algorithm to try and prove that Bing are in fact stealing their results. Bing haven't denied it.

Google are likening the digital ‘copying' to leaning over the back of a fellow student during an exam and copying the results.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft's Bing search engine emailed Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land and said:

As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query.
Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals.

KitGuru says: Innocent or theft? share your views with us

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