Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting"

eldavojohn writes "In a blog post titled 'Setting the Record Straight,' Microsoft's senior vice president of online services, Yusuf Mehdi, addressed Google's 'Bing Sting' operation saying, 'We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.' Mehdi went on to claim that Google engaged in 'click fraud' in order to rig up their alleged 'experiment.' Mehdi added, 'That's right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn't already know.' The struggle for Bing to usurp Google as number one in search continues."

Re:So the answer is yes

[donutello]

"The moral of this story is: if you use IE, then your information is being passed to Microsoft and being used. Even if you go to Google. "

This used to be a technical site. Now it's populated by idiots with no knowledge of technology. It's installing the Bing toolbar that sends your data to Microsoft, not using IE.

By the click-stream data

[donutello]

The Bing results are not based on Google's returned results. They are based on the fake data generated by the Google engineer showing that a user searching for those search terms then visited those sites. For the purpose of this test, that site would end up on top of Bing's results even if it were the 558th link in Google's results - if that was the only one the Google engineer clicked on.

Re:Response from Another VP

[clampolo]

I have been using ixquick [ixquick.com]. I like that it doesn't keep any data on you. You can even set it to use https so that noone else is snooping on your searches.

Re:Response from Another VP

[RobNich]

While Google search results look like links directly to their targets (because they are, right up until they are clicked), Google uses javascript to dynamically rewrite the link target to google URL which includes the target page URL and search terms, which is how Google tracks the click throughs (this Google page then redirects to the real target with a 302 response.)

Interesting theory, but demonstrably untrue. Install Live HTTP Headers and do a Google search, then click a result. There's no such redirect.

They track clicks of search results using Javascript, using the mousedown event on each search result link. There doesn't seem to be a server-side call, so they're probably setting a cookie with the click information and then reading the cookie later, when you return to Google.