When I heard that Google had accused Microsoft of copying Google’s results for their search engine Bing, it was like 1995 all over again. Great snakes, I thought, can’t Microsoft develop anything on its own? Yes, I still hold a grudge over Microsoft’s plagiarism of the MacOS. But it appears there’s a bit more to this story.

The way Google unearthed the alleged copying was reminiscent of ‘copyright traps‘ that map-makers set. You don’t want someone copying your map, so you insert fictional towns into it. If anyone else shows the same town on their maps, you know they must have copied you.

In Google’s case, they took the unusual move of hard-coding strings of nonsense letters (e.g. “mbzrxpgjys”) so that it would find a certain web page (say, a theatre in Los Angeles.) The page wouldn’t even have the search term in it — it was totally arbitrary.

Within a few weeks, sure enough, Bing’s results started to show a few of Google’s hard-coded results. Caught red-handed!

But Microsoft, it appears, wasn’t copying; at least, not directly. Bing uses crowd-sourcing, a legitimate and very smart kind of information. If you’re using the Bing toolbar or Internet Explorer (with ‘Suggested Sites’ on), it’s watching what you do and reporting it to Microsoft. So if you search for something (on Bing or Google), it watches which suggested page you go for, and it upweights that link. So that would explain why Google engineers, after trying the links a few times, would trip Bing’s sensor, and their nonsense link would get into Bing’s results.

I’m a Microsoft hater — I won’t have MS software on my computer, and I use iWork rather than Office — but I don’t think Microsoft is doing the outright plagiarism that Google is accusing them of. They’re not copying, they’re imitating. It is creepy to have your computer watching you, though, so if you don’t like it, then don’t use the Bing toolbar, and don’t use Internet Explorer. Good advice anyway.