(H/t TechFlash) I wanted to get the Bing team’s take on Google calling them out for “cheating” so I clicked over to the Google search blog. (Thank you! No, we have fun.) 

I’ll fit the search contretemps in a nutshell here–but you can find the whole story, including search forensics, at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land: “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.” 

Basically, Google engineers first noticed that Bing was delivering the same results for misspelled words as Google was giving. That struck them as odd because on Bing’s page, the misspelled word was still misspelled. Google has spent a lot of time and money dealing with the problem of search monkeys typing in the wrong word, so they were curious about Bing’s new ESP technology. 

To test their hypothesis–“Bing is reading our minds”–they constructed a number of fake search results for decidedly uncommon searches (“hiybbprqag” and “mbgrxpgjys,” for example), and entered them in IE with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar on. Presto! Bing started serving up Google’s fake results, too.

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Now, Bing would like you to know this is only possible when Google is the only source with information on these mysterious terms. (Though, as Sullivan points out, it’s those rare, “out there” search successes that can make a search engine’s name. If Google is the only source, that says something.) Nor are they directly spying on Google–people are using Google in IE browsers (or while using the Bing toolbar), and have “agreed” to let Microsoft observe their usage. Bing’s Harry Shum, PhD, explains:

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We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

Still, this kind of real-time piggybacking steps over the line from research that improves your own algorithms to simply copying (“We do not copy Google,” says Microsoft). Parasitic behavior is a questionable strategy for a company that trumpets innovation, but often finds itself playing catch-up. As evidence of a mindset, it’s troubling because parasitism does not seek to displace the host, after all, just to profit from it. Whether or not it’s fair is one concern; but once again you have to wonder if Microsoft executives understand how much money you can waste on marketing and PR if your own actions belie those promises.