Recently the war between Google and Bing intensified due to Google accusing Bing of copying their search results and as it seems righteously so.
Today it has become clear to me that Microsoft wants to win the war with Google by using any means wether their ethical or not. Looking for some images to use as on this blog I used the Google image search but more than once I ended up unintentionally on Bing image search.
Check for instance this image search result link: http://www.google.co.id/search?um=1&hl=id&biw=1270&bih=599&as_st=y&site=search&tbs=isz%3Alt%2Cislt%3Avga&
tbm=isch&sa=1&q=roast+trump&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
Now click on the 4th image in the top row which should be this one:
So, the image is linking to here:
http://www.google.co.id/imgres?q=roast+trump&um=1&hl=id&biw=1270&bih=599&as_st=y&tbs=isz:lt,islt:vga&tbm=isch&
tbnid=NuUtStxMtcVzJM:&imgrefurl=http://exposummitglobal.com/comedy-central-roast-of-donald-trump%2526page%253D6&imgurl=http://0.tqn.com/d/comedians/1/0/z/G/-/-/109904207.jpg&w=3000&h=1997&ei=bca7TYmjO8mJrAfA5PyxBw&zoom=1
And….. BING!
Now, I’m a techie guy but this is a bit beyond my knowledge so any help is welcome.
The value of the var imagerelurl in the query is http://exposummitglobal.com/comedy-central-roast-of-donald-trump%2526page%253D6 which is redirected to the Expo Summit Global Homepage and looking at this site I’m pretty sure the image was never published on that site.
Looking at the value of imgurl link, which is http://0.tqn.com/d/comedians/1/0/z/G/-/-/109904207.jpg&w=3000&h=1997&ei=bca7TYmjO8mJrAfA5PyxBw&zoom=1 we’ll see it being redirected to http://www.about.com/#!/editors-picks/
But copy paste the whole link into your browser (or just clicking the image in Google) end you’ll be redirected to http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=roast+trump.
So unless I’m completely wrong here it seems Bing is doing some crafty SEO shit on Google to get some serious referral traffic from them. Just do some image searches yourself and you’ll find it won’t be too hard to find similar examples.
What kind of deals are behind this I don’t know but I’m really curious to see what Google’s response will be.