Somehow the fine engineers in Google’s search department caught wind that Microsoft had been cheating.  Before they confronted Microsoft they wanted to double check what they were hearing.

Apparently Microsoft has been watching Internet Explorer users with the Microsoft Bing search bar installed who then search to Google to complete their actual web searches.  Many internet users actually just type “google” into the top search bar instead of putting www.google.com in the address bar. Once an IE user searched for Google, Microsoft would then watch what they were searching for and pop those search results into Bings search results. Sounds easy enough right? Of course there is an element of end user privacty violation here along with straight up cheating.

As Danny Sulivan from Searchengineland.com reported, once Google established this cheating was going on they went ahead and set up a sting.

Google’s search engine engineers coded some crazy results into their search aglorithms. This is something they’ve rarely ever done.  It all started in May of 2010 when Google told Sullivan they noticed that Bing was showing some remarkably similar results for uncommon words that were mispelled.

The example shown via searchengineland is a search for the word tarsorrhaphy when they put it in for testing they purposely mispelled the word as torsoraphy.  Google corrected the spelling and yielded the results below.

As you can see in the example above Google corrects the misspelling as a suggestion and returns the correct results. However over at Bing the exact same results are yielded for the misspelled word

Not good enough proof eh? Well consider this example.  The Google engineers used the word hiybbprqag who knows if it’s even a real word.  Google linked the search term hiybbprqag to the Wiltem Theatre’s seating chart, something totally not related to the word hiybbprqag which actually terms up search results for stories like this one.  See the Google results below. Remember these are results that Google engineers staged.

And in this example Bing shows the exact same superflous results:

The Google engineers did a whole slew of words and kept finding the same results over and over again. For every fake word they put in and then url linked the search engine results Bing had the exact same results.  Look at this example for the word: mbzrxpgjys, in this instance, probably for fun and to give a dying operating system some hits, Google engineers linked this made up word mbzrxpgjys to Rim’s home page.

And a Bing search resulted the same thing.

So after seeing these examples, and more here, we’ve got some questions that you probably do as well. First off is Yahoo search yielding the same thing because Bing is currently powering Yahoo? And question 2, if Bing is just going to copy Google, Verizon, can you just put Google back in place?

Source: Searchengineland and Fortune