What do Google and a bunch of Internet fraudsters have in common? According to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice-president (online services), they both engage in “click fraud.”

Click fraud is a practice employed by people whose websites make money based on per-click ad sales. In a typical click fraud scheme, the perpetrator will click ads on their own site in order to generate revenue. In advanced schemes, several users, or even computer programs, will click ads.

If you’re wondering how a senior Microsoft VP comes to publicly accusing Google of engaging in fraud, the story goes back to the summer of 2010, when Google noticed something strange on Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine and a competitor to Google.

According to a Feb. 1, 2011 entry on Google’s official blog, last summer Google noticed that a search term had been misspelled in its search database. The name for a rare surgical procedure, tarsorrhaphy, had accidentally been spelled “torsorophy.” Google corrected the mistake, but not before noticing that the misspelling was appearing on Bing.com’s searches.

This raised Google’s suspicions, and the company decided to try an experiment.
According to the company’s blog, Google created about 100 “synthetic queries”(words made up of random letters), and linked these random strings of letters to real sites. Twenty engineers were then given laptops, which had fresh copies of Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and the Bing toolbar installed on them, and were told to search for the synthetic queries on Google.

It wasn’t long before Google started noticing these search terms, and their unique results, popping up on searches performed through Bing.com.
Google says that this makes it clear that Microsoft is harvesting information from IE8 users, essentially copying Google results, and using that information to make Bing stronger.

The funny thing is Microsoft isn’t denying it.

According to a rebuttal by Microsoft’s Medhi, which appeared on Bing’s blog, Microsoft is fully willing to admit that they harvest anonymous “click stream” data from IE8 users (who have the option to not provide this data), “as one of more than a thousand inputs into [their] ranking algorithm.” Furthermore, Microsoft claims that Google engineered this “experiment” because they are scared of the threat Bing is starting to represent.

“Is this simply a response to the fact that some people in the industry are beginning to ask whether Bing is as good or in some cases better than Google on core web relevance?”

Moreover, Microsoft insists that regardless of Google’s intentions, what they did “was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as ‘click fraud.’”

Since the initial accusation and rebuttal, things have been pretty quiet on the blog front, with both Google and Microsoft’s blogs returning to business as usual. Perhaps Google has realized that Microsoft called their bluff, and maybe Microsoft is hoping that this whole thing blows over. Regardless of who you think is right or wrong, though, one question remains: Would Google have even bothered to set such an elaborate trap if they didn’t think Bing was becoming a threat?