By now you’ve no doubt smelled the shitstorm surrounding Google’s allegation that Bing are ‘cheating’ and copying Google’s search results. If not, in brief, Google spotted that Bing sometimes includes results that seemed to be copied from Google, so Google set up a honeypot – they made some made up words like [hiybbprqag or juegosdeben1ogrande] cause Google’s SERPs to link to random unrelated sites. A few weeks later, around 8% of those sites showed up on Bing for those queries.

In what is being dubbed by many as “BingGate”, Google then leaked a great story onto searchengineland.com who ran with the headline Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results. This on the very same day that the Farsight 2011 event was held – a discussion about the future of search between Matt Cutts (Head of Webspam at Google), Harry Shum (Bing Corporate Vice President) and Rich Skrenta (CEO of Blekko) – great timing Google. Classy.

When I read about the story on hackernews, I pretty much immediately saw what was going on – Bing are using click data from everywhere to improve their results. Now I’m no MS evangelist. I run OSX, had gmail when it was still 6 invites per user, yada yada. (heck I run adsense and analytics on my blog. I love Google, which is why I’m massively disappointed to see this kind of behaviour from them!)

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