Howard Yeend on the Bing/Google Search Engine Spat

Howard Yeend makes the case that Bing isn’t doing anything wrong, only something clever. They’re tracking which links IE users click on — and IE users click on a lot of Google search results.

Related: MG Siegler tracks the back and forth sniping on Twitter between Google’s Matt Cutts and Microsoft’s Frank Shaw.

Update: Here’s what I think. What Microsoft is doing is clever, but I think it qualifies as a form of spidering. Bing’s automated web crawlers wouldn’t index Google search results because Google’s robot.txt policy forbids it. I think Bing’s click-tracker should obey robots.txt policies as well.

★ Thursday, 3 February 2011