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Bing vs Google: Google Turns Spy in 'Bing Sting'
The news has always been dominated by feuds and wars, from celebrity bitching to corporate backstabbing. One area that you probably would not expect to find handbags at dawn are internet search engines, however this week the rivalry between Google and Microsoft Bing stepped up a notch as Google accused Bing of stealing its search results. One of Google’s top engineers revealed that they had resorted to sneaky tactics to unmask Bing’s cheating ways, posting made up search terms that they linked to completely unrelated websites. The accusation then hit the social media channels as Google’s Amit Singhal Tweeted 'never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined this: Bing cheating, copying Google results.' What follows has all of the characteristics of a tabloid ‘he said, she said’ with Bing describing Google’s claims as a ‘spy novelistic stunt’, using all of the tricks in the book to try and usurp Bing’s growing popularity.
Google has enjoyed a long reign as the internet’s premier search engine however Microsoft has been steadily creating a serious campaign to knock Google off the top spot. The battle between the two technological powerhouses has escalated with Google launching its own suite of competing software products to rival Microsoft’s. This latest revelation is being referred to as the ‘Bing Sting’ and required the efforts of 20 of Google’s top technological engineers. Each of the engineers took home laptops to search for a list of obscure terms that had been previously linked to unrelated websites. After searching for these terms on Google the engineers then moved onto Bing where they found that the same terms brought up a familiar collection of completely random sites.
Although Microsoft has denied copying the results, the damage to the search engines reputation may already have been done. A spokesman for Bing has stated that they simply collect results from customers who are willing to share information with them, using what they describe as a ‘collective intelligence’. It seems that now would be the right time to start betting on next year’s cinematic blockbuster ‘The Search Engine’...