Google Says It Can Prove Microsoft Is Stealing

Google may not love Apple but the search giant has never accused the iPhone-maker of digital plagiarism.

The Mountain View-based search giant says Microsoft's Bing has been monitoring what people search for on Google and then mirrors those results on its own page.

The head of Google's web spam took to Twitter to announce that his company would be taking Microsoft head-on over the accusations.

"I'm about to be on a panel with Bing and ask them how http://goo.gl/m3IWc on Google showed up as http://goo.gl/CTjsE on Bing," Matt Cutts tweeted Tuesday morning.

(Google's head of search, Amit Singhal is a guest on "Press:Here" this Sunday, Feb. 6.)

The claim was first brought up by SearchEngineLand Tuesday. Bing's corporate vice president responded to the claim on his blog Tuesday.

While not denying the accusation, Harry Shum admitted that his company monitors some Google users' activity to improve Bing's own search.

"We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm," he wrote on his blog. "A small piece of that is click stream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users."

Shum was also scheduled to speak at the same conference in San Francisco Tuesday as Cutts.

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