• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 2, 2011

Search marketers who think they've heard it all might want to give it another thought. Google on Tuesday accused Bing of pillaging search results, which Microsoft denied. Now with Bing powering Yahoo search, does it influence results on Yahoo, too?

With the news came word that Google had set up a trap. It didn't occur overnight. In fact, the whole carefully planned and orchestrated sting took months. Amit Singhal, Google fellow, explains it all began in the summer of 2010, while looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query, torsorophy. Google returned the correct spelling, along with results for the corrected query. Bing had no results for the misspelling at the time, but later that summer it did.

Microsoft, of course, denies the allegations and says the data comes from customers. "What we saw in today's story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking," explains Harry Shum, vice president at Microsoft Bing, in a blog post. "It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

Microsoft says Bing relies on more than 1,000 signals in its search ranking algorithm. A "small piece" of that is clickstream data that comes from some customers, he writes. These customers opt in to share anonymous data as they navigate the Web to help Microsoft improve the experience.

"We do not copy Google's search results," Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, wrote in a prepared statement, reiterating the goal of using multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results.

The disruption comes not too long after Google announced changes in CEO from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page, and an algorithm change aimed at cleaning up spam in search engine rankings. Some searchers have complained that searches often turn up meaningless results and important information has become more difficult to find.

Similar to a stock portfolio, diversifying campaigns on search engines seem to be the way to go. The average small business advertiser spent $2,126 in the fourth quarter of 2010, while average keyword counts rose to 87 root keywords, up 30% for the same quarter in the prior year, according to a recent report from SEM agency WebVisible.

Small-business advertisers also took advantage of the slow migration in October of Yahoo advertisers to the new Bing adCenter platform and shifted spending from Google, a strategy that appears to have at least temporarily bolstered both click-through rates and clicks leading to phone calls.

Costs per click (CPCs) fell 23% on Yahoo and Bing in November and 29% in December, compared with Google. At the same time, click-through rates for advertisers with ad programs on the Yahoo-Bing platform were 10% higher than those on Google during December, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the dispute between Google and Bing went down after Google presented the findings to Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who wrote an article that started a firestorm of misuse. The news went out just prior to the conference ThinkBig Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, an event sponsored by Bing. One has to wonder why Sullivan -- no relation -- doesn't work for Google, or why Google doesn't acquire Search Engine Land. Just a thought.