The age of the digital revolution has brought with it innovation, as well as, ethical dilemmas. Weblogs, wikis, remixes, and file sharing have all revolutionized digital media, but have also blurred the lines of ethical and unethical. Issues have come to light that are very different from the issues of yesterday more clearly covered by regulations. One recent case of ethical issues that has been present in the media is that of Bing and their alleged copying of Google search results.
Earlier this month, Google accused its competitor search engine, Bing (owned my Microsoft), of copying their search results. After running a sting operation, Google found that Bing had been spying on Google's searches and matching their top search results. As far back as last May, Google noticed Bing was returning many of the same sites the Google produced for their searches. This was even true for misspelled words, but interestingly, Bing offered no spell correction for the misspelled word, where as Google would. This definitely was a red flag to Google that something was going on, as Google has a very advanced spell check program that matches misspelled words to the closest correct spelling, then renders a search for that correctly spelled word.
In October 2010, Google also noticed that the top 10 search results the Bing was producing began matching Google's even more closely. In addition to this, the number of times that Bing and Google produced the same first choice result increased as well. Google set up their sting in response to this growing suspicion that Bing was somehow copying Google's results. Google manually ranked results for certain words that very few people, if any, would look up and that returned no results on both search engines. The chosen results that Google decided to rank at #1 had no relevancy to the topic or word searched. Google then had employees search these terms at home to see if Bing's engine would pick up on the planted search results and eventually start posting them. Some examples of search terms Google used were "hiybbprqag" and "mbzrxpgjys"... which you probably realize are not words and would return no results. The only reason these terms rendered results was because Google engineers forced certain unrelated pages to come up as #1 ranked results.
Sure enough, two weeks later, a few of the fake terms Google had been planting results for on their engine began showing the same planted results when searched on Bing.
Google had planted 100 of these terms and about 7 - 9 of them showed the forced results Google had ranked as #1. That's about 8%, but Google was convinced enough to accuse Bing publicly. Since all of the major players in the search engine world are super secretive about their top secret search algorithems, its really hard to say if Bing was just copying the popular results for certain searches or have a similar algorithem. The legality of the issue as well is hard to say. It's definitely not very ethical to copy the results of a competitor, but it would first of all be hard to prove the results were copied and hard to prove that Google "owns" their results. Bing and Google still come up with completely different results for many searches, so obviously, Bing isn't copying them constantly or search by search.
Google, at one point and still to a small extent, had a very unique product. They are one of the most popular and most accurate search engines worldwide. The pressure that Bing is putting on them may hopefully push them to continue developing their product. I think this entire issue is, overall, just embaressing for Bing and Microsoft. Google is not effected by it, besides being a little annoyed. Google has removed the code forcing the specific results for the search terms, so now if you google any of them, you return results about Bing copying Google's results for that term.
This instance just goes to show the growing vagueness of what is legal and what is not in the age of the digital revolution. Ownership and copyright have become grey areas. Remixing can be seen as a similar issue to this Google vs. Bing issue in regards to ownership. Remixing other people's work, to some, is a form of stealing or copying. Today's society is much more lenient with this issue and ethical problems regarding ownership have increasingly come to surface. While Bing's alleged copying of Google search results has started discussion of the issue, no law or regulation is going to come from it. Hopefully, it serves as a lesson and Bing's embaressment will help to keep other companies honest.
Here is Steven Colbert's coverage of the Google vs. Bing case.
I loved this post! You did a great job of explaining in detail how Google's engineers set the trap that nailed Bing. Excellent use of graphics to illustrate how the made-up words returned similar results on both search engines.
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