Microsoft is taking some criticism after a “Bing Sting” operation from Google. Google employees typed in nonsensical words like “hiybbprqag” into Google searches in Internet Explorer. The browser recorded their searches, even to which results users clicked on the most, and prioritized Bing’s results based on another company’s data.
Now, those Google results are out there for the public to see. Is it unethical to use someone else’s work and put your name on it? In some circles it’s called “plagiarism”. I know that when I post articles on this site, there are other sites who have an RSS feed set up to auto-post what I said and call it their own content. Yeah. Annoying.
So, Microsoft’s defense is that using Google results to fuel Bing is just a part of their clickstream data mining technique. Users opt-in for their actions to be recorded anonymously and used by the company to improve the computing experience. It helps us, the people doing the searches, as long as it is evaluating the frequency of hits in Google compared to other sources. But did you stop to think what opting in actually meant?
All I know is that now “hiybbprqag” brings up results about the Google vs. Microsoft conflict.
