“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine. I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The spell correction that Google uses in its engine was used to first spot the possible monitoring by Bing. Results given by Google after correcting a misspelling were being given by Bing without correcting the spelling. After analyzing data and realizing that something fishy may be afoot, Google devised a plan to uncover what was really going on. This operation would mark the first time Google has tampered with its own search results, and it shows how important this was to them.  Google made a honeypot search result that would pop up if a user typed in a totally illogical word. For example, if you typed in a string like “abcdxsios”, Google would return a page discussing the historical relevance of unicorns. After a while, Bing search results would show the unicorn page as a result for the illogical string.

Microsoft was defensive about the whole case, claiming that the Bing toolbar tracks users click data, providing the information back to Bing, providing the identical search results. Angered by the claims against Bing, Microsoft formally responded to Google by saying they "do not copy Google's results."

After the buzz spread, Harry Shum, VP of search development for Bing, came out and basically accused Google of profiting from search spam results, according to businessinsider.com. The pretty bold claim accuses Google of playing both sides of the spam game; by allowing spam sites to make their money by running Google Ads, in which Google does take a share of the profits.

Shum claims that 70% of spam sites use Google Ads to help fund themselves:

"I'd say you are really sidestepping the big problems, the origin of the spam, why they appeared in the first place. There must be an economic incentive to create his kind of content. Why? 70% of those pages show Google Ads....You can't just say because you don't report to VP of ad sales you have no problem".

Google then replied saying it does scan websites, regardless if they use Google Ads or not, periodically, removing any websites that contain spam from their search results and advertising program.