How To Catch a Thief

Reading Rohin's post on 'Google India's Hebdomada Horribilis', I couldn't help but think of a parallel from Google's own history.

Sometime in 2010, a few engineers at Google strongly suspected that Bing, a search engine that Microsoft launched in 2009, was copying some of its results. Bing's search results were eerily similar to their own. It was not self-delusional suspicions of an early mover. As Amit Singhal explained in Google's official blog: "we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries."

What Google did next was a classic stuff you would have read in comics or seen in movies - plant a deliberately false information, and see the mole fall into the trap. (On spotting a couple of thieves near his house, Vijayanagar's court jester Raman of Thenali tells his wife loud enough to reach the ears of the men hiding in the dark:"Let's pack all our valuables in a box and throw it into the well." And he throws a big rock instead. In Singham, a recent box office hit, the lead character uses a similar trick to lure the antagonist's brother to a hospital)

It's not just in the realm of fantastic. A very earthy businessman who was into data entry and transcription told me that he deliberately inserts mistakes into a document before it moves from the data entry operators to the checkers to see how thorough the checking is. When I asked him if it didn't indicate a lack of trust, he said, "may be so, but my clients are happy when I tell them this is what I do".

Google did something similar. It created 'synthetic queries' - nonsense words like "hiybbprqag" and "juegosdeben1ogrande", and let its search engine throw a top result that had nothing to do with query. If Bing had indeed been copying it would return the same result over the next few weeks. And sure enough Bing did.

Amit Singhal ended his blogpost with a good deal of self-righteousness: "At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop."

Such is the nature of life that barely a year after exposing Microsoft's practice, Google finds itself right at the centre of something similar. The nature of the mistake, the act of getting caught, the explanations, the apologies - the parallels are pretty fascinating.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.