The sultan of search (Google) is in a war of words with Redmond’s software giant (Microsoft). Google called shenanigans on Microsoft’s search team, claiming that Bing copies Google’s search queries and the sites users select in order to provide more relevant results. But is Bing really cheating?
“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm,” the Bing Team explained in a blog post. “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.
“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.”
You can read more what the Bing Team had to say right here.
Image Credit: kpmrs.com
