Microsoft hits back at Google search claims

Microsoft has hit back at claims that the company copies Google search results for its Bing search engine.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services division, lambasted Google in a posting to the Bing search blog, denying claims that Microsoft is copying Google search results and click data.

"We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting," he said.

Google said that it had proved the claim with an in-house study using a group of machines which posed random search queries that Google said later appeared as Bing results.

Mehdi dismissed the experiment as a 'honey pot' technique specifically designed to manipulate Bing results, and insisted that the data came not from copying Google data, but from collecting user traffic information.

"We do look at anonymous click stream data as one of more than 1,000 inputs into our ranking algorithm," he said.

"We learn from our customers as they traverse the web, a common practice in helping to improve a wide array of online services."

Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Market Research, said that, even if Microsoft had copied Google search data, it was not necessarily doing anything wrong.

"This would be akin to football teams sending scouts to watch the strategy of other teams, which is commonly done," he told V3.co.uk.

Enderle suggested that, if Google does want a study into Microsoft's practices, it should arrange to have an unbiased third party look into the matter rather than rely on its own in-house experiments.

Even then, however, the analyst believes that Microsoft has done nothing wrong and the issue is little more than a "tempest in a teapot".

"To me, this is Google becoming a big old company. This is something that big old companies do," said Enderle.