Earlier today a clash of the titans, or clash of the search engine giants, sparked an Internet out burst of Google accusing Bing of stealing their search results. From the looks of it, Microsoft was caught red handed in stealing both titles and descriptions of various search results.
Microsoft was defensive about the whole case, claiming that the Bing toolbar tracks users click data, providing the information back to Bing, providing the identical search results. Angered by the claims against Bing, Microsoft formally responded to Google by saying they "do not copy Google"s results."
After the fact, Harry Shum, VP of search development for Bing, came out and basically accused Google of profiting from search spam results, according to businessinsider.com. The pretty bold claim accuses Google of playing both sides of the spam game; by allowing spam sites to make their money by running Google Ads, in which Google does take a share of the profits.
Shum claims that 70% of spam sites use Google Ads to help fund themselves:
I"d say you are really sidestepping the big problems, the origin of the spam, why they appeared in the first place. There must be an economic incentive to create his kind of content. Why? 70% of those pages show Google Ads....You can"t just say because you don"t report to VP of ad sales you have no problem.
Google then replied saying it does scan websites, regardless if they use Google Ads or not, periodically, removing any websites that contain spam from their search results and advertising program.