In a surprisingly aggressive move, Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Services Division, criticized Bing competitor Google over their recent Bing sting. Mehdi is alleging that Google engaged in click fraud and a "honeypot" attack in an attempt to trick Bing. Mehdi staunchly defended Microsoft and its two-year-old search engine in the blog post, stating, "We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop."
Last week, Google leveled charges that its most popular search results were being cut and pasted into Bing, but of course, Microsoft steadfastly denied the allegation. Mehdi went on to say that Google has proved nothing: "What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index."
Click fraud is, essentially, gaming a click ranking or traffic analysis service (like a search engine) by feeding it non-genuine click data. Instead of relying on actual customers clicking out of genuine interest, click fraud usually involves a computer program or script that mimics an actual person, in turn providing a padded statistic. At first glance you might think that the accusation is a serious one; as click fraud is considered a felony in California - the state Google calls home. Further analysis, however, shows that the click fraud in this case was referring to how Microsoft tracks IE users' searches and web activity, not anything to do with clicking on ads that would have a monetary impact.
Mehdi also explained Microsoft's attempt to enhance search engine functionality in an infinitely more positive light: "We have brought a number of things to market that we are very proud of -- our daily home page photos, infinite scroll in image search, great travel and shopping experiences, a new and more useful visual approach to search, and partnerships with key leaders like Facebook and Twitter."
Living up to the unwritten law that corporate bragging must include a shot at the competition, Mehdi added, "If you are keeping tabs, you will notice Google has 'copied' a few of these."
We'll have more on this story if and when the corporate maligning continues.
