In what is perhaps the most brilliant move in the whole Bing copies Google search results fiasco, it looks like Google Taiwan employee Chih-Chung Chang has redirected http://www.hiybbprqag.com, a URL inspired by the nonsense terms Google used to bait Bing, straight to the Google Jobs page. Search Engine Land points out that that Chang registered the domain on February 1st, the day the story first broke, using the Google Taiwan office address.
"Hiybbprqag?" How Google Tripped Up Microsoft
Hiybbprqag. It sounds like a rare cuisine or a complex chemical. But according to Google, Hiybbprqag is the nonsense word that proves that the team behind the Microsoft Bing search engine is cheating. In a statement released this week, Google's Amit Singhal alleged that Google engineers had long been suspicious that Microsoft was copying queries from Google results pages – including "rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries."
So Google decided to run what has been termed a "Bing Sting." "We created about 100 'synthetic queries' – queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," Singhal wrote on the official Google blog. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query."
Google claims to have found other instances of URLs from its search results that also found their way into Microsoft's Bing - including "search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing."
We couldn't shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google's top search result appeared at the top of Bing's ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google's search results in Bing's ranking.
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