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| Un-Photoshopped autocomplete. |
Suspect espionage?
Set up a sting!
"I'm Feeling Lucky" did.
...last May, when Google noticed that Bing was returning results similar to its own (even when users entered a misspelled word), it stared to get curious. Last October, Bing was showing even greater overlap with Google's top ten results than ever before... they set up a sting operation to catch their search engine predator.
For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls “synthetic” searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google... (more)
This excellent piece of counterespionage strategy worked. Bing pinged the same results. When Google outed Bing at a search engine conference, the Microsoft response was something like, "So what."
The point... Business espionage is becoming more brazen. Your opponent does not even to pretend to care about morals, ethics and legalities. You need to make friends with a counterespionage specialist or your pockets will be picked.
