MS is poaching Google search results.

Somebody at Google thought that MS was poaching their search results that were ranked highly, enough so that they designed a sting to promote a junk word and its search results to the top of its algorithm.  What happened next?  That junk word and top result all of a sudden turned up at MS’s search engine Bing. Behind the scenes it looks like Internet Explorer is returning Google search results via the Bing toolbar addon to MS so they can add it in.

Here was the process: 1) Google employee makes sure some fake word does not exist in google or bing search results. 2) Said employee points google’s cache results of that word to some random page. 3) Said employee uses Internet Explorer at his desk at Google to make the search appear in Google, then selects the only link as the correct thing he was looking for and Bing somehow acquires this information. 4) Search now appears in Bing.

Like much of what Microsoft does, it’s not technically ‘wrong’, but it certainly is pretty darned sleazy and underhanded.

MS clearly believes in its search engine capabilities so little, that its not even trying anymore