I have noticed that over the months (since 2010), Bing was catching up on Google in terms of search relevance and search results. Almost all the things that I searched on Google using my IE with improve user experience turned on appeared on Bing after a few minutes. This is odd since I search them on Bing first (laziness to turn the default search engine to Google).

For months I was thinking it was normal due to the mere fact that Microsoft has acquired of some search engines including Yahoo’s directory over the years. I was not aware that even Google itself was intrigue on this issue and they have conducted a test by inserting fake search terms and fake search results on their database. This dummy data was used as a test medium to confirm the theory that somewhere inside IE8 or Windows itself is a recorder of Google search terms and results. The test will prove true if the bogus search terms will appear on Bing and eventually the search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction. This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.” — Bing Corporate Vice President Harry Shum

As a rule of thumb, this is semi fool proof for the following reasons:

• A website that never existed won’t ever be indexed
• A search term that is bogus won’t ever be used to search on Bing in an almost at the same instant when it was search on Google.

The results:

This may be a coincidence so more searches are performed and this time using an existing website with an added credit union name search. Frankly speaking, due to different search algorithm, the following images should be different.

If you are to read their privacy policy, Microsoft states that they are capturing some (at least as they claim) of your browsing data unless you switch certain features off. IE8 always spook me due to hidden connection to Microsoft which was being tracked by Kaspersky firewall even if all the features was turned off on my side, I was just trying to imagine that it was the update service that is calling home.

Microsoft has posted its explanation of how it uses more than 1,000 different “signals” to create its search algorithm. They also claimed that they are not copying anything. An excerpt of a blog post from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President:

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

Sources:
Google’s official post
Microsoft’s response