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Bing scraping Google

Did you catch this little story yesterday on Marketplace? The story first broke at Search Engine Land. Apparently, Bing has been stealing the search results of Google and reproducing them in their search engine. WHAT!

Microsoft is cheating in the search engine war

Apparently, yes. Google had their suspicions that this was happening so they planted a few very nonsensical search results in their index. In a sting operation, engineers at Google started placing dummy search results that made no sense deep in the search giant's huge database. For example:

Searching "indoswiftjobinproduction" shows you the Food Network

The idea was simple. If Microsoft's Bing was scraping search results from Google and then using the result set in their search engine, you would be able to reproduce this craziness in Bing. Sure enough, I ran that search today (along with a billion other SEOs) and here are the results:

Most interestingly, Bing doesn't deny this claim. After all, how could they? It's out in the public record for all to see. But think this through a bit as it has implications for SEO and SEO resellers.

At HubShout, we've long maintained that SEO should be focused on Google since it makes up 85% of search. This assertion became even more important last year when Bing and Yahoo merged their search results (see this, this and this). Based on this new data, it really has become clear that - in terms of SEO -

There really is only one search engine to worry about

If you get your results in Google, chances are you will have them in Bing and Yahoo now too.