It’s all kicking off in the world of search engines. News broke this week of the results of a sting operation conducted by Google on the suspicion that competitor Bing was copying their results.
Apparently Google had been suspicious since May 2010 when they noticed Bing was returning identical results for misspellings of uncommon words, and without even correcting the misspelling. On the hunch that there were some shenanigans going on, Google set up a ploy worthy of a spy movie (albeit a very geeky one): create a trap whereby they would consciously falsify their own results for searches involving random strings of letters. (more…)
