Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

The interesting thing here is that Google now has the smarts and power to play games with Bing, and were I MS, that fact would scare me more than any lawsuit.

So in an effort to be as good as a competitor MS is watching what you do when you interact with that competitors website and sending that information home. Seems like a really big reason to suggest to anybody you know that they uninstall the Bing toolbar.

"Is it illegal? Is it cheating? Is it unfair?" Who cares? Google already got everything it needed out of this situation: a gigantic PR win, and a morale boost for their own team. Well played.

I'm not sure about this. It almost sounds like Google is posturing. The reason I say this is that while Google was getting bombed up until last week with scraper sites, Bing wasn't.

If Bing was really copying results, they would have reflected the spam sites, because people click on those when they are highly ranked just as often as they click on the originator site. After all, the problem is that the content is identical.

Search for "hacker news" on both. The results are quite different. One might argue Bing is better because they don't have a duplicate result at the top.