Bing's excuse (at the time in 2011) was that it was the result of Internet Explorer, Bing toolbar, and other user behaviour within their products which seeded this data.
I'm curious if the Google engineers visited any of the 100 search terms using IE or Microsoft service... but I doubt that. There had to be some level of scraping. It's pretty embarrassing.
They also were using autocomplete terms that matched Google's perfectly, which is what initially caught Google's attention.
> I'm curious if the Google engineers visited any of the 100 search terms using IE or Microsoft service... but I doubt that.
From the article:
>We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
> We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).
I'm curious if the Google engineers visited any of the 100 search terms using IE or Microsoft service... but I doubt that. There had to be some level of scraping. It's pretty embarrassing.
They also were using autocomplete terms that matched Google's perfectly, which is what initially caught Google's attention.