The web is all a twitter (pun intended) over claims by Google that Bing is stealing their search engine results.  I won’t re-hash it – this link has plenty of reading material.  Google’s honeypot trap got me thinking.  What if, after installing the Bing bar and accepting all the “would you like us to track your links to improve Bing” options like Google did, you clicked on incorrect links to make the wrong associations?  Would Bing learn those associations?

Let’s look at Google’s example.  Let’s say the Google engineers typed one of their nonsense words like “hiybbprqag” into Google with the Bing bar installed, but instead of clicking a results link they scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked the “About Google” link.  After a few weeks of doing this, if you typed the nonsense search term into Bing what would you get?  My suspicion is that Bing would deliver Google’s about page as its #1 search result.  Of course this is impossible to test with this particular term because it’s now all over the internet, but anyone with a week or so of extra time on their hands could try the same experiment with their own nonsense term.  They don’t even need a honeypot page in Google search results – they already have the About Google page.

If you tried this same trick in the Chrome, or the Google or Yahoo toolbars, would Google and Yahoo search results end up delivering the about page too? 

I think all of these toolbars do the same thing:  they create a feedback loop between the stuff you type, and the stuff you ultimately click on, and use that data to improve the search index.  This happens on all pages, strengthening links based on what people actually choose.  If you happen to be clicking on Google search results with the Bing bar installed, Bing learns what you chose as the most relevant from Google’s index.  If you are using Bing in Chrome, Google adjusts its index based on Bing results.  Just don’t do both – the internet might crash in an infinite loop.