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As to how strongly Bing uses Google as an "indicator", I think the results from this definitely-not-long-tail search are pretty telling:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+are+you

http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+old+are+you



How is that telling, exactly?

The top 4 results (including one which has the domain name of the query) are the same but in a different order. The rest of the results appear totally different.

Even if one random query you ran returned an identical first 10 results, exactly what would that prove? Statistically significant how?


How likely is it that completely different ranking algorithms would turn up the solarviews.com and ruthannzaroff.com results on the first page?


I'd start with the fact that they both have the keywords of the search string in the page title and in the URL string.

Look, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that two different algorithms can yield the same results without one having used the other as an "indicator". To trot out a tired phrase, correlation does not imply causation (and I'd argue you don't even have correlation at this point.)


That's a good point, I'm downgrading my opinion from "suspicious" to "curious".


I agree...

So just between us, is this an indication that Bing uses Google strongly or doesn't use it strongly?




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