How Google Tested and Caught Bing cheating, Copying Google Search Results

   A little competition never hurt anyone. Actually competition leads to innovation and the ones who benefit the most from it are the consumers. Its the same with search engines. However the war of the search engines is getting uglier day by day. Google is undoubtedly the king of the lot, but Bing has advanced a lot in a short amount of time.
Here the question is whether Bing is really that good. According to Google, the reason behind Bing’s success is that it is cheating from Google.

Supposedly Bing keeps monitoring what people search for on Google (using Internet Explorer and its Suggested Sites feature) and the results produced. Then they use this information to improve their search results. This has been proved by Google and bing has not raised a voice against such an allegation.
It was last year that Google realised that Bing was doing exceptionally well, giving the same sites in the top ten results as Google for similar searches. It was then noticed that when a misspelled word was searched in Google, it first gave the correct spelling of the word and then the related sites. Bing, on the other hand, returned the same sites as top results without even correcting the spelling.

  How Google Tested Bing’s Cheating?

Google then decided to test this theory. The people at Google fabricated search terms which no one would search for and manually ranked specific pages as their top result, even though those pages had no relation to the search terms. A few days after this was done, a search for those keywords on Bing showed those same pages as top results though they had no connection with the search terms, thereby confirming Google’s accusation.
According to Amit Singhal, a Google team member,

I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book. I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating.

Google is extremely unhappy with the entire situation. This whole matter has raised a number of questions and a lot of issues that are yet to be solved.