Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it (2011)

If people are having to dig up 7 year old articles to bash Microsoft, I guess they've improved a lot.

IIRC they literally installed a Bing toolbar and agreed to turn on a feature that indexes all the sites that the user visits. To then blame Bing for indexing their decoy page, when Google themselves gave permission to index it, is absolutely laughable.

This is 7 years old though, I would be curious to see if the experiment is still repeatable today.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed personally that bing has gotten a lot better, but that could just be because it&#x27;s still a delayed version of Google.<p>Microsoft may even be using IE to harvest data to reverse engineer a Google search algorithm. Even if they make an inferior verision thats 90% as good, that&#x27;s still good enough to keep them relevant in the market.

So they..<p>* Inserted results into the search index for odd queries like &quot;hiybbprqag&quot;<p>* Searched Bing for those queries<p>* Saw the result from google<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it have been easier and just as definitive to just<p>* Search Bing for hiybbprqag<p>* Show that google received a search query for the same thing

Original thread on HN from 8yrs ago (511 upvotes): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2167875" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2167875</a>

This is really bizarre that MS(Bing) can still claim that they don&#x27;t use Google results with such an investigation and fake results showing identically in both places, having originated on the Google side. Come on Bing, just own up!

In essence, sounds like a bit of keylogging, data-sharing with external site(s). From the article, even Google couldn&#x27;t exactly figure what was going on technically. Makes me wonder what else Microsoft was recording and sharing at the time - or was it just limited to google.com.

I actually think Bing is ahead of Google for image search these days.

Bing and Google get their search results by scraping websites that other people own. For bing, google is just one of the website they scrape.<p>So probably not illegal - though it definitely looks bad.

This is so typical Microsoft. Zune, Xbox, Bing, literally 90% of what they do is a rip off of other innovators ideas.