Google accuses Microsoft of copying search results to Bing

Google has accused Microsoft of copying its search results and using them in Bing.

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google, said at the Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco that the search firm's spelling correction group noticed last year that Bing's results were starting to match Google's to an unusual degree.

Google then conducted an experiment, setting up results to nonsense search terms and asking 20 engineers with clean laptops running Windows, IE8 and Bing to search for the terms.

"For inserted results we found that in two to three weeks the same results would show up in Bing," Cutts said.

"Microsoft has said that they don't copy search results, and we have screenshots that show just that. We suggest that click data from Google is being used in Bing."

Harry Shum, corporate vice president of search at Microsoft, who shared a panel with Cutts, said that he wished Cutts had discussed the issue with him before going to the press.

"It's not like we copy anything. We learn from customers who share data with us," he said. "We learn from what kind of clicks they do. The reason the web works is collective intelligence."

Shum suggested that the similarity could be explained by the data gathered from users who agree to share information with Microsoft which is reflected in Bing's results. He finished the debate by saying that they were both engineers and could find the root of the issue.

In a sometimes heated discussion Shum compared the situation to the data harvested by Google's toolbar, but Cutts said that Google does not use URL data from that tool.

Bing users might not be clear at how much data they are sharing with Microsoft, he added.