Dinesh Mistry:

Yesterday, Google shed light on a sting operation they conducted and said they had proof that Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

Today Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior VP of Online Services responded.

We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.

Mehdi, then took it one step further and accused Google of performing “Click Fraud”

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.

Read the full post here

Is Google just trying to redirect focus from the recent discussions surrounding Google’s SERPS being full of spammy results? Maybe, they chose to wait 30 days before going public with thier findings.

What are your thoughts? Is Bing cheating from Google?

Google Instant is expanding. The company has just announced new features and wider availability of the search-as-you-type feature.

Let’s start with the latter; Google says Instant is expanding in two ways:

Google Instant On Vertical Search Properties: In addition to being available on Google.com searches, Instant Search is now functioning on “many” of the vertical search options in Google’s left navigation column, like Videos, News, and Blogs.

Google Instant In New Countries: Instant Search is now available to signed-in users in 12 new countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Finally, when using Google Instant, there are new keyboard navigation options. You can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate through the search suggestions (pretty sure that’s always been the case) and through the search results, too. This video shows how it works.