Matt Cutts weighs in heavily on the whole week's battle with Bing over copied search results. Comments are interesting too.

A compelling post on the side of Bing.

By choosing gibberish search terms that produced no natural results, Google effectively eliminated all other factors that could have influenced Bing's rankings. The terms were found on none of the pages in the index and certainly aren't used in any links pointing to any sites. So when Google engineers suddenly provided a data point (the click data collected via the Bing toolbar) for Bing to latch onto, it's no surprise that even a minor factor was able to influence 9% of the rankings. There are a couple of points that are very important to establish at this point. First, ranking the same site #1 for any given query doesn't mean Bing is "copying" Google's results.

Second, the data being collected does NOT belong to Google. Yes, the data is being collected when the user is visiting Google, however, the users opted to provide their use data to Bing. Bing didn't somehow hack into Google's data, and Bing didn't scrape Google's search result page. Bing used data provided by their users to influence their rankings, which is a practice they've readily admitted is in use.

Pretty damning post by Amit Singhal, head of Search at Google.

As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

* Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
* the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.

From the BigThink conference, Bin's VP of Search had interesting responses to Matt Cutts' questions about Bing copying Google:

s not like we actually copy anything. It’s really about, we learn from the customers — who actually willingly opt-in to share their data with us. Just like Google does. Just like other search engines do. It’s where we actually learn from the customers, from what kind of queries they type — we have query logs — what kind of clicks they do. And let’s not forget that the reason search worked, the reason web worked, is really about collective intelligence.

Interesting observations...

To verify its suspicions, Google set up a sting operation. For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls “synthetic” searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google. These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor quality matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. With the code enabled, Google placed a honeypot page to show up at the top of each synthetic search. 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. This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.