In a blog post Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Services Division wants to set the record straight between Bing and Google. During Farsight 2011, an event sponsored by Bing, Google questioned Microsoft on their recent search success and then went on to say that Bing has been copying Google"s search results.
So in an effort to set the record straight Yusuf said with complete conviction:
We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. 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 went on to say that Google set the whole thing up ahead of time by manipulating Bing"s search results,
Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.”
Bing uses anonymous click data as one of the ways to help improve their search results and according to Yusuf, Google took advantage of this feature to trick Bing"s search index.
Yusuf goes on to point out that Google has taken a few ideas from Bing, back in June the Google homepage looked almost identical to Bing"s when they briefly added images to the background. But according to the post Microsoft doesn"t mind when others copy them, they want to help bring and build on great ideas in the industry.