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Computerworld - Bad Microsoft! Bad! No biscuit for you!

If Microsoft were a dog, I'd be scolding it for its latest foolishness. It turns out that rather than searching the Internet on its own, it's been riding the coattails of Google. This isn't just a theory. Google set up a clever trap, and Microsoft's search engineers fell right into it.

It's an interesting little story, and I'll get into the juicy details in a minute. But the affair also leads me to ask the general public whether they have ever recognized that the results that search engines supply are inherently prone to bias and incompleteness. The extent to which that is true is something that every Web user should grapple with.

But now to the Google-Microsoft flap. To see whether Bing really was stealing Google's results, Google hand-coded arbitrary search results for nonsensical query terms. Sure enough, as time went on, these nonsense search items became findable on Bing. Google believes that Microsoft stole the search results by looking over users' shoulders both with the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing browser toolbar. In short, as Google fellow Amit Singhal put it: "Our testing has concluded that Bing is copying Google Web search results."

Bing Director Stefan Weitz danced around the issue, saying, "We do not copy Google's search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. The overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites." In other words, yeah, we did look at Google searches and used it to rank sites.

It's the Bill Clinton defense: It all depends on what your definition of "copy" is.

Some anti-Google writers claim that Microsoft wasn't doing anything that wrong. John Simpson, from Consumer Watchdog's Inside Google research team, wrote, "Google's complaint is the height of hypocrisy. The company's entire business model is built on the use of other people's content usually without bothering to seek permission."

To which I can only reply, "Welcome to the wonderful world of search engines." That's what any search engine does.

To do it well, of course, a search engine needs unfettered access to the Web and its myriad contents. That's pretty much the way things are here in the U.S., where we may debate privacy rights, but not the idea that a newspaper article published on an open Web site without a paywall should be searchable.