Here's the link to official view of Google: Google's statement. Google performed some experiments that lead it to the conclusion that Bing results come directly from Google, and whoa that led to an outrage in the search engine industry. All this was soon followed by a defense from Microsoft claiming to set the record straight. Well that was achieved for a while because Microsoft had some convincing arguments suggesting that use of click through data does not amount to copying results, which as any search engine expert may know does make sense for many SIGIR, ECIR, WWW, WSDM papers do that too. It's in simple words a learning activity performed to improve the relevance of search results. Here are the punch lines by Bing:
"We do look at anonymous click stream data as one of more than a thousand inputs into our ranking algorithm. We learn from our customers as they traverse the web, a common practice in helping to improve a wide array of online services. We have been clear about this for a couple of years (see Directions on Microsoft report, June 15, 2009)."
It seemed that it had all ended but Matt Cutts does not want to let go off it that easily, and his latest post on the subject includes a forty-minute video with some good and well, not that good points. Here's the video:
The fight seems to not end that easily but the search engine industry now stands at a crucial point with experts of the field divided between pro-Google and pro-Bing. One thing's for sure and that is, the war between these corporate giants will give us many interesting insights from point of view of how search engine industry works. Feel free to add any comment/point-of-view.
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