Web Pro News has a timely article posted on their website about the recent happenings between Google and Bing. While the title of the post may be a little misleading (and created for shock factor) "Bing Accuses Google of Click Fraud" is still a good post and helps to shed some light on the issues that the two mega-million dollar search monsters are bickering over.
In essence, Bing takes user shared data and includes these signals in helping to rank their search results. This user shared data comes in many different forms through their browser and other places. Of course the sharing of this data is public and supposedly legal since those sharing have consented to it (through some terms of services or what not that everyone agrees to). And all of the big players do this (Google included). The issue at hand is that Bing uses some of the data from its users who are searching on Google. This will in effect create ranking results which are very similar to Google's.
It sort of makes sense if you think about it. If you are looking to create search engine results and you are tracking user behavior through another search engine, they will start to produce the same results.
Of course the engineers on both sides are picking through the fine details (like a bunch of whining attorneys) to point blame at one another. But in the end, this whole affair provides much media fodder and additional exposure for each company.
I say they are both guilty and who cares.
Lets not forget what all of this really about... Eyeballs and advertising dollars (and lots of it).
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