2 Comments

Bing Flatters Google

Feb 4, 2011
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That say that imitation is the highest form of flattery…well Google thought that Bing might be “imitating them” in the form of copying their search results. So the Google engineers rigged a “sting” to catch Bing in the act.

Google engineers set up random results on their site for a series of unlikely search terms, such as “hiybbprqag.” (Google arranged for the nonsense word to point to a Los Angeles theater seating plan on its search engine.)

“Within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing,” Google said in a statement on its official blog Tuesday.

Google is trying to position Bing’s activities as offering up recycled search results from a competitor, while Bing is positioning the practice as one of over 1,000 different signals and features in their ranking algorithms.

Bing’s Corporate Vice President, Harry Shum comments regarding Google’s sting? “a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment.”

Looks like they are both complementing each other… imitation and creativity!

About Adam Viener

Adam Viener is the Chairman & Founder of imwave, inc, a leading performance search engine marketing agency. Imwave focuses primarily on building and launching effective pay-per-click search engine keyword marketing campaigns for companies paying commissions on sales and leads generated. In both 2009, 2010 & 2011 Imwave was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies by Inc. Magazine. Imwave recently announced they had served over 5 Billion ads for their clients!

Adam, a serial internet entrepreneur, founded one of the first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) in 1993. He has a deep understanding of internet technologies and profitable internet marketing tactics. Adam currently sits on the publisher advisory boards for Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network.

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Filed under: Internet Strategy + News + Search Engine Marketing + SEO
  • http://ThePerfectDesign.com Justin Bowen

    Good one Adam. Gotta love the way Bing turns it around. Funny! BTW, Google has been scraping my sites and displaying information about my sites on their search results pages for years now. Where's your unique content Google, huh? You're just scraping up and displaying my content ;o)

  • Corey K Katir

    Is Bing A Better Search Engine?
    We have created a logical test that shows which search engine provides better search results. Google or Bing? I will explain the test on this page.
    First, I would like to make the test concept more clear with several examples:
    Say we take a series of Titles to search on Google and Bing for comparison.
    Here are several example: (all the tests are at http://www.rssfeedrss.com/index2.html) Title 1) Patients are willing to undergo multiple tests for new cancer treatments http://www.rssfeedrss.com/test2.html
    Title 2) Conference on composite materials for structural performance: Towards higher limits
    http://www.rssfeedrss.com/test4.html
    Now, I explain the way this test works. Each title is about two or three main keywords. For example Title 1 is about cancer treatment. Title 2 is about composite material.
    I propose a logical test that uses Google, and also Bing search results that extracts the main keywords in a logical manner. The better search engine will provide a better and more relevant extraction based on this logical test. I like to emphasize logic.
    Now what is this logical test? The better search engine provides search results that contain higher number of main keywords in the search page results (usually in bold).
    For example, if we take title 1 to either Google or Bing and make a search on the whole title and then count the number of times the main keywords appear in the search results (usually in Bold), the better search engine will give us cancer treatment and not other words. That means if you count the number of times the keywords cancer treatment appear in search results in both Google and Bing, Bing provides a higher quantity.
    I used both Google and Bing for the test on the page http://www.rssfeedrss.com/index2.html and Bing provided a better search. You can do this test in-house.
    I will propose this test in search engine conferences. It is a valid test. I can email you the perl file that performed the test. Call 949-500-8638 or email info@katir.com.
    In fact, if you continue the test to second page results, it also shows which search engine provides better search results for the second page or third page or….
    Why is this test valid?
    It is not very complex to prove why this test is valid. If you type a sentence that contains several main keywords, you prefer more information about those main keywords. The higher quantity of those main keywords prove the page is more relevant and the search engine has delivered more relevant results.