From the San Jose Mercury News
Google accuses Microsoft's Bing of 'cheating, copying' search results
By Mike Swift
SAN FRANCISCO – Google on Tuesday accused Microsoft's Bing search engine of copying its results, after running an elaborate "sting" operation that Google says caught its top search rival in the act.
"Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined this," tweeted Amit Singhal, one of the Mountain View company's top search scientists. "Bing cheating, copying Google results."
Microsoft fired back, accusing Google of a "spy-novelesque stunt" and denying it was cribbing from Google. However, a Microsoft executive confirmed that Bing uses data from Google searches conducted on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 browser to improve its results. It emphasized that data is voluntarily supplied by users....
The donnybrook blew up as some of the top search scientists from Google and Microsoft convened Tuesday morning for a conference sponsored by Microsoft at UC San Francisco. Instead of a polite, abstract discussion about computer algorithms and artificial intelligence, a morning panel of the "Farsight 2011" conference became a slugfest between Shum and Google principal engineer Matt Cutts. "I was absolutely stunned" by the level of hostility, said panel moderator Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at UC Berkeley, Duke and Harvard. "I tried to control it," he said, but neither side would leave the topic.