COMPUTER AND TECHNOLOGY

Bing search results showing up in Google !

If you try the following query:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A.bing.com%2Fsearch

You get about 20,500 search results from Bing. This would not be such a big problem normally but it seems that Google is incorporating Bing search results and crawling Bing search pages, which seems rather odd for a company that has just

accused its competitor of doing just that (never mind that Bing only used its toolbar as a url discovery device, not to ‘copy search results’ but that sounds a lot better in the press).

On top of that the http://m.bing.com/robots.txt file (which seems to be the source of the results) has this entry in it:

Disallow: /search

Which explicitly disables access to other crawlers on that directory (for all user agents, so that includes the google bot).

I wonder how Google is going to explain the presence of these results away, not only do they do *exactly* that which they accuse the Bing team of, they also blatantly ignore the robots.txt file.

The longer I spend on researching this case the more I think that Google will eventually regret going public with this rather than to talk this over quietly with the Bing team. Even if we forget about the robots.txt file the fact that Google states unequivocally that looking at a competitors search results is somehow wrong, immoral or illegal then they should not be doing that themselves even if they were permitted to do so.

If you live in a glass house you should not throw stones.