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Google: Sting proves Bing copied search results

Microsoft's search engine Bing is copying results from Google, the dominant search engine on the internet, has claimed. Suspicious of their new rival, Google engineers set up random results on their site for a series of unlikely search terms, such as "hiybbprqag." (Google arranged for the nonsense word to point to a Los Angeles theater seating plan on its search engine.) "Within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing," Google said in a statement on its official blog Tuesday. Google said it welcomed honest competition, but sneered at Bing's "recycled search results from a competitor." Bing did not deny that it took Google into account when producing its own search results, but suggested they were only one factor among many. They also accused Google in turn of a "spy-novelesque stunt" that would only affect very unusual search terms. "We use over 1,000 different signal...