Bing Setting the record straight - Search Blog - Site Blogs - Bing Community

Excerpt from a response by Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Online Services Division

Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results.  What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.

Now let’s move the conversation to what might really be going on behind the scenes.

Bing Setting the record straight - Search Blog - Site Blogs - Bing Community