Google is accusing Microsoft Corp. of cheating to get ahead in race between the two rivals in the search engine market, but Microsoft denies the charge saying it's just using all the tools available to lessen its rival's dominance.
"The company noticed last year that Bing (Microsoft's search engine) was returning search results that seemed a little too close to Google's own especially for obscure, misspelled queries"- Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Web spam team said.
Google is suspecting Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and various toolbars and plug-ins were feeding information back to Microsoft that would help Bing's results become more Google alike. Google decided to investigate the matter and so the company made a list of obscure search terms and manually linked them to unrelated websites. Then 20 Google engineers took home laptops loaded with Internet Explorer, searched www.google.com for those terms and clicked on the artificial results. Soon after searching for the same odd terms on Bing would call up the same odd results.
Microsoft's corporate vice-president for Bing, Harry Shum responded during a panel discussion with Matt Cutts at the San Francisco event. "It's not like we actually copy anything," Shum said. "We learn from customers who are willing to share data with us, just like Google does." In a blog post, Shum called Google's trap "a spy-novelesque stunt."
