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In May 2010, Google took notice that Microsoft's rival search engine Bing was consistently turning up the same sites when someone would enter unusual misspellings. Search Engine Land - who not only goes into great detail about the result snatching, but also uses an excellent and relevant picture from Real Genius in their post, shows "torsoraphy" as an example. Google corrects it to the correct spelling of "tarsorrhaphy", bringing up the relevant search results for that term. With Bing, the misspelled word gets no correction and still lists the "tarsorrhaphy" results.
By October, Bing had started showing a greater overlap with Google's top results than previous months, including instances where both search engines told listed exactly the same page in the number one spot. Sure, there were lots of searches that did not come up the same, but Google suspected Bing had done something to its search algorithm to make the results to be more like Google's. They figured that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser could be sending back data from Google searches to Bing.
Google crafted a sting to confirm their suspicions, and created a "one-time code" that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term. They also made close to 100 "synthetic" searches of the most random, obscure searches that could be entered - searches that returned a tiny number of poor quality matches or none on Google or Bing. Once they integrated the code, Google placed a "honeypot" page to show up at the top of each synthetic search. As Search Engine Land simplifies, "The only reason these pages appeared on Google was because Google forced them to be there. There was nothing that made them naturally relevant for these searches. If they started to appeared at Bing after Google, that would mean that Bing took Google’s bait and copied its results."
Google engineers started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing. Microsoft's PR machine countered with the expected "we do not copy Google's results," but it's hard to deny or explain otherwise...
In May 2010, Google took notice that Microsoft's rival search engine Bing was consistently turning up the same sites when someone would enter unusual misspellings. Search Engine Land - who not only goes into great detail about the result snatching, but also uses an excellent and relevant picture from Real Genius in their post, shows "torsoraphy" as an example. Google corrects it to the correct spelling of "tarsorrhaphy", bringing up the relevant search results for that term. With Bing, the misspelled word gets no correction and still lists the "tarsorrhaphy" results.
By October, Bing had started showing a greater overlap with Google's top results than previous months, including instances where both search engines told listed exactly the same page in the number one spot. Sure, there were lots of searches that did not come up the same, but Google suspected Bing had done something to its search algorithm to make the results to be more like Google's. They figured that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser could be sending back data from Google searches to Bing.
Google crafted a sting to confirm their suspicions, and created a "one-time code" that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term. They also made close to 100 "synthetic" searches of the most random, obscure searches that could be entered - searches that returned a tiny number of poor quality matches or none on Google or Bing. Once they integrated the code, Google placed a "honeypot" page to show up at the top of each synthetic search. As Search Engine Land simplifies, "The only reason these pages appeared on Google was because Google forced them to be there. There was nothing that made them naturally relevant for these searches. If they started to appeared at Bing after Google, that would mean that Bing took Google’s bait and copied its results."
Google engineers started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing. Microsoft's PR machine countered with the expected "we do not copy Google's results," but it's hard to deny or explain otherwise...
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