SearchEngineLand‘s Danny Sullivan has just relayed breaking news that Google has proof that Microsoft is stealing search results from Google and placing them in Bing results. This is big news, considering that with Yahoo’s announcement that it will display Bing results, “we’ve never had so few search voices as we do now.”

Google suspected Bing was stealing their search results for certain queries from Internet Explorer users with the Bing toolbar installed, so Google engineers created a series of “tests” which mapped a hundred or so random query strings (like ‘hiybbprqag‘) to a random search result set, and then visited those pages at Google from home computers using Internet Explorer with the Bing toolbar installed.

Here’s an example, which is still working as I write this, hiybbprqag at Google:

and the same exact match at Bing:

The results amazed them, yielding 7 to 9 exact matches over at Bing within a few days. Microsoft has not confirmed or denied anything yet, but answers will surely soon follow.

Mr. Sullivan does not seem to think this conduct is illegal, but in such a concentrated and sophisticated market, anticompetitive conduct often carries great risk with it. Although Microsoft is probably only “tuning” their results by looking at Google’s, Microsoft is nonetheless piggybacking off of the search giant, and definitely without Google’s consent.

Tags: bing, google, monopoly

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 9:11 am and is filed under Law, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.