The Microsoft-Google feud bursts back to life over "plagiarism"

Finally, after years of effort and countless sums spent on development, Microsoft seems to have a web search engine whose search results can rival Google's.

But now Google is crying foul as it claims it has spotted evidence that Microsoft's Bing engine is literally scraping its results.

Now the subject of "search results plagiarism" has become the subject of a heated argument between the two companies - and let's face it, they haven't needed much excuse for heated arguments over the years.

Our customers for IT support, Bristol and beyond, won't be radically affected whoever wins this argument, but it does go to show that the battle between these two giants of the computing world takes place on almost any frontier it can find - and it might affect your choice of browser (Google's Chrome or Microsoft's IE8) depending on which side you believe!

Browser wars overlap with search wars

There's a technological side to this dispute, with both parties accusing each other of similar misdeeds related to their competing web browsers.

The main evidence: screenshots of apparently nonsensical search terms on both engines. Google says it planted dummy results because it suspected they would show up exactly the same on Bing. Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, they did.

By Google's reckoning, Microsoft used its IE8 browser toolbar to lift Google results from user searches and slip them directly into its own Bing search results. How does this happen? According to Google search guru Matt Cutts, if you accept the default settings on the IE8 toolbar, or agree to Microsoft showing them "suggested sites" on IE8, you are effectively helping Bing to dip into Google's results.

Microsoft hit back by saying that Google does the same thing with its Chrome browser, collected data from Bing's results to help refine its own search engine - which Google has indignantly denied.

Nobody has yet been shown as the clear winner in this argument, but to Microsoft's annoyance, it managed to completely overshadow the conference in San Francisco that Bing was sponsoring to debate the future of search.