Search Engine War: hiybbprqag - Has BING been copying Google's search results?

Tuesday, 01 February 2011

Has BING been copying Google in order to improve their search engine results?

According to Danny Sullivan the Google Engineers think so and set up a honeypot to test their theory.

hiybbprqag one of the honeypot phrases still live:

Other keyphrases to check include:

mbzrxpgjys http://www.google.co.uk/#q=mbzrxpgjys
indoswiftjobinproduction http://www.google.co.uk/#q=indoswiftjobinproduction

Increasingly I have noticed results from both engines looking really similar. But there are a couple of things that don't quite seem right about this experiment though.

Only some of the honeypot results showed up, so the mechanism by which BING was discovering the pages may not have been as obvious as the Google engineers thought.
The keyphrases in the examples are very specific without other matches, so if for any reason BING discovered any links to those pages using the same link text it's quite likely it would rank the exact same result as Google anyway.
A quick check of the cache shows the Google engineers used link text to promote the pages for the target phrases, so a reasonable question is - Did the Google engineers actually hide all the links from BINGBOT as effectively as they thought?

This is Google's cache of http://www.rim.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 30 Jan 2011 03:00:00 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: mbzrxpgjys

This is Google's cache of http://www.foodnetwork.com/sandra-lee/recipes/index.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 1 Feb 2011 12:13:45 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: indoswiftjobinproduction

Comments

Surely it's fair game for the scraper to scrape the scraper??

Posted by: Paul Reilly | Tuesday, 01 February 2011 at 04:11 PM

@Paul Reilly
What?

Posted by: Wat. | Tuesday, 01 February 2011 at 05:15 PM

So, if my search engine returns no results for a query and I then check the competition and return their results that sounds like good customer service to me. Yea bing should add a courtesy of google disclaimer, but hey Google is free to every one, dont want some people using google? better start charging.

Posted by: bob oh | Tuesday, 01 February 2011 at 10:16 PM

Yea bing should add a courtesy of google disclaimer, but hey Google

Posted by: viktor37 | Saturday, 05 February 2011 at 01:28 PM

A very interesting and informative article.

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Posted by: web master | Thursday, 31 March 2011 at 01:06 PM

This is so nice post. Because today competition has always been there, the few survivors of those portal wars woke up to discover that search was hot, a money maker and increasingly dominated by a then upstart called in Google. Thanks share this nice blog.

Posted by: web design hampshire | Friday, 08 April 2011 at 08:10 AM

nice .......... lol

Posted by: cheapjordansbr | Tuesday, 19 April 2011 at 12:53 PM

google .is god..

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Posted by: cheapjordansbr | Thursday, 21 April 2011 at 12:47 PM

i found it very informative. well all i can say is Google is still dominating.

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Posted by: MRjavinbur @(tout) | Friday, 17 June 2011 at 07:50 AM

When I click on any of the listings on a Google search results, I am taken to another search called bywill.net, usually, and not to my selection. After reading your article about bing I did a couple of test searches and was redirected as above and then to bing. I usually have to copy and paste a URL to go there. Your article seems to be true, or it's even worse. They have captured my searches. Any suggestions on how to stop it?

Posted by: David | Friday, 17 June 2011 at 12:27 PM

Very informative article. I've found lots of excellent contents about search engine optimization & social media optimization! nice blog :)

Posted by: Affordable SEO Services | Monday, 04 July 2011 at 12:41 PM

yes google is still dominating that is why i prefer to add google custom search in my search engine at http://www.fantola.com . may in future if i find a working partner than..

Posted by: fantolasearchengine | Friday, 15 July 2011 at 08:14 AM

you need to differentiate the content as much as possible then wait for it be recrawled.

ps I notice on one of your other sites, that you are using;

Remove that line ;)

Posted by: Ramesh Dhiman | Thursday, 11 August 2011 at 10:04 AM

ou need to differentiate the content as much as possible then wait for it be recrawled.
ps I notice on one of your other sites, that you are using;

Posted by: Ramesh Dhiman | Thursday, 11 August 2011 at 10:05 AM