My thoughts on this week's debate
Earlier this week I was on a search panel with Harry Shum of Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko (and moderated by Vivek Wadhwa) and the video now live. It's forty minutes long, but it covers a lot of ground: — One big point of discussion is whether Bing copies Google's search results.
Context & Ripple Effects
This panel lands in the middle of an unusually public fight over how Bing builds its index: TechCrunch frames it as 'How Google Ambushed Microsoft' and Kara Swisher's BoomTown reads 'Larry Page written all over it,' meaning the syndicated reaction treats the copying question less as a technical dispute than as a deliberate strike ahead of Larry Page taking Google's top job. Matt Cutts putting the video up turns a forty-minute panel into the week's venue where Harry Shum has to answer for it directly.
The lineup matters beyond the two giants: Blekko's Rich Skrenta sits on the same panel just weeks into scaling his slashtag-based engine, so the debate about whether Bing mirrors Google doubles as a showcase for the small player claiming differentiation. It also extends a long arc — Bing had already been buying relevance through deals like its 2009 Twitter firehose integration, and the field has been contesting search on distribution since the people-search wars of 2007.
First-order effects
- Harry Shum is forced to defend Bing's result-building practices on camera, making Microsoft's search team answer the copying allegation publicly rather than through blog posts.
- Rich Skrenta gets a national-stage moment for Blekko alongside the two incumbents, useful positioning for an engine whose whole pitch is doing search differently.
Second-order effects
- The syndicated headlines from TechCrunch and BoomTown reframe the story around Google's tactics ('ambush', Page's fingerprints) rather than the copying evidence itself, turning the dispute into a reputational duel that both companies now have to manage.
- Microsoft's response posture hardens: every subsequent Bing feature announcement will be measured against whether it can be read as imitating Google, raising the cost of fast-following.
Third-order effects
- Search competition is migrating onto the terrain of data provenance and ethics — who sourced which signal — a battleground where smaller players like Blekko argue transparency as their differentiator against scale advantages they cannot match.
- If accusations of result-copying become a recurring weapon, search engines face pressure to document independent indexing capability as a competitive asset, reshaping how the industry talks about quality.
The trend: The contest between Google and Bing is shifting from product features to public accusations over data sourcing, with third-party panels and blogs as the arena.