Bing copying Google search results

The TL;DR version of the above story is that Google were suspicious that Bing was returning very similar results for a lot of searches. They did some investigation along with some intentional traps and found that Bing was copying their results.

Google claim that they made a one time only tool that intentionally put some fake data into their results and this was the first and only time this has ever happen. Mhm... Sure...

It seems that the Bing toolbar and the IE search suggestion feature monitors what you're doing and sends it to Microsoft. Its listed that this happens so they're not doing it secretly but this is the first time I've seen it actually have any real world visible result. I assume Google/Yahoo and everybody else who has a search engine + toolbar does exactly the same thing so this isn't singling Microsoft/Bing/IE out for anything.

If Bing is copying Google data, how can its results be so much worse?

The reports coming out from people testing both Bing and Google indicate that results can in fact be quite similar. Some searches producing even an identical top 10 list.

Google has also stated that neither their browser nor their toolbars perform this type of search analysis and further, that data entered/visited in those products do not contribute to page ranking and search indexing.

Google didn't comment on why their own search results suck shit.

You can't trust anyone anymore!

I'm going back to using Northern Light in my Netscape Navigator!

What's truly sad is that Yahoo is apparently killing AltaVista.

People still use Altavista? I remember years ago when that was the search engine to use as everything else had an index of about 5 pages.

The only Altavista thing I still use is Babelfish but that got moved over to Yahoo.

Considering they couldn't even be bothered to update the about page in 8 years, it's kinda surprising it's been around this long under Yahoo. Makes me wonder what hardware the site is still running on.

I jumped from Altavista to Google the week Google debuted. I checked out AV a couple of months ago and the site was pretty barren. A ghostly shell of sorts.

I guess I would expect them to have similar results.

I guess some do! It was my search engine of choice until Google first came along. Naturally, my post was more of a joke. I kind of liked that the site was still around. In a nostalgic way.

True that. I've noticed Google results getting worse and worse lately. A lot of the more obscure searches I do are taken over by pages clearly created to ensnare unsavvy users or are so filled with advertising to be unusable. Then there are the results that look legit but are actually taken over by fake anti-virus scanner pages arggh.

To say that 90% of the search results are useless garbage, would be, an understatement.

A new slogan might be.

"Google: The results are shit, but what choice do you have?"

or

"Google: So what?"