Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Return of "Hiybbprqag" (GOOG, MSFT)

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Early this year, Google got angry at Microsoft for ripping off its search results.

Microsoft had been using the MSN and Bing Toolbars to track what users were searching for at Google. Then it was using this data to improve Bing's own search results.

Microsoft had actually been doing this for a couple years, and had been pretty open about the practice, but Google decided to make a big deal out of it, showing some proof in the form of fake search terms that turned up exactly the same results in Bing as in Google.

One of those terms was "hiybbprqag." (Steven Colbert later joked that it meant "you got served.")

Now, look at what that term returns on Bing:

Google Bing whiner hiybbprqag

That's a hard-coded result, by the way -- part of Bing's effort to provide answers rather than just links. Bing (including Yahoo) has gained about four points of market share versus Google in the last year.

(Credit to @edbott for noticing first.)

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