Google has become quite the juggernaut since its creation as a mere research project in 1996.
Google is easily the most popular Internet search engine. The company has made leaps and bounds toward Apple in the cell phone market and even in the PC operating system market to compete with Microsoft.
When it comes to the tech world, the aforementioned companies are giants — thus leading to some heated competition with each company trying to outdo the other.
There’s a saying I’ve always heard growing up: “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’,” and Microsoft seems to be “tryin'” really hard with Bing.
Microsoft’s “decision engine” launched in summer 2009 as a direct competitor to Google Search.
And for the first year and a half of its existence, it seemed more of a nuisance to Google than true competition.
Sort of like that annoying fly whizzing around your head while you study, or your kid brother who constantly tries to say he’s better than you but ends up being the comic relief among you and your friends.
Sure, Microsoft has been pimping the hell out of it through those awful TV and radio ads, but the fact of the matter is, Bing just sucks.
However, a couple weeks ago, Google pointed a big finger at its newest competitor, claiming Bing was copying its search results.
“It all started with ‘tarsorrhaphy,'” according to Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
Tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids, for those of you curious.
Last summer, Google was looking at the search results for an unusual misspelling of tarsorrhaphy (misspelled “torsorophy”).
Google’s Search had corrected the misspelling of the word and returned the corrected query.
At the time, Bing had no results for “torsorophy.”
Yet, later in the summer, Google engineers discovered Bing returning the same first result as Google’s Search did for “torsorophy” without correcting the spelling of the word.
After more investigation, Google noticed a significant increase in Bing returning the same results of commonly spelled and misspelled words as Google Search.
To test whether Bing was truly copying Google’s results, the company set up a sting operation.
“We created about 100 ‘synthetic queries’ — queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag],” Singhal said in The Official Google Blog.
Basically, Google manipulated its search algorithm as a “one-time experiment” and paired random Web pages to search queries like “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” and “juegosdeben1ogrande.”
Searching those two terms would return a local credit union and a hip-hop jewelry store, respectively — one could easily see that neither have anything to do with the initial search.
Google suspected Microsoft was gathering information by receiving users’ searches using Internet Explorer and the Bing Toolbar.
So, after Google set up the modified algorithm, it gave 20 engineers new laptops installed only with IE and the Bing Toolbar.
After two weeks, Bing started showing the same top result for nine of the 100 “synthetic queries” set up by Google.
Microsoft claims “Google’s ‘experiment’ was rigged to manipulate Bing search results,” according to Bing’s Official blog.
Bing went on to claim it simply watches what its users search, not what Google searches. It also went on to make the point Google has copied Bing in certain instances as well — which is true.
Google did redesign its Image section to more closely resemble Bing’s “infinite scroll.”
The fact of the matter is a user interface redesign is a tad different then a direct copy.
Is what Bing did illegal? Technically, no.
Is it cheating? It could be — or it could be incredibly clever.
It’s like the kid in class who looks at his neighbor’s answers during a test.
Sure, the neighbor could be upset he spent all that time studying for someone else to copy his answers — but, if he were smart, he wouldn’t put himself in a position to be cheated on.
Adam Arinder is a 21-year-old communication studies senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_aarinder.
 
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Contact Adam Arinder at [email protected]