Not that long ago, Microsoft’s Bing launched a new campaign called “Scroogled” which is intended to bring back “honest search.” Microsoft believes that shoppers who use Google for their shopping searchers are getting “Scroogled” and being shown advertisements rather than what they really want to see. Now, Microsoft’s Bing search team slams Google yet again after Google offered no defense to the allegations made by Bing.
Bing launched a new campaign called Scroogled, just in time for the holiday season, to highligh that Google is up to no good with some changes made to Google Shopping. “Google recently pulled down its ‘product search service’ and replaced it with a ‘paid listing ads’ service. Search for ‘Canon EOS’ in Google Shopping and you receive pages that look like the old days, with ‘results’ down the middle and ads mixed in. But the ‘results’ are also ads. Every product offer within the shopping search results on that page are paid to be there, and where and how high they appear is at least in part dependent on how much they paid,” Bing stated when the company launched the Scroogled campaign.
So did Google ever respond to such allegations? According to Bing, Google did respond by praising their service and never explaining how the products get listed in the first place. “They did not contradict or argue any of the facts and information we laid out. The silence is disappointing given how important this issue is to consumers and the online industry as a whole,” Bing adds. Bing continues to argue against the “pay-to-rank” system that Google uses and recommends Bing instead, which operates on a higher set of principles. “Unlike Google Shopping, we will not take money to boost a merchant’s rank in our shopping search results. In short, we don’t do pay-to-rank. Where we do have ads, we label them clearly as ads,” Bing mentions.
We know that Google is a large entity on the internet, but Bing argues that it is growing and by Google blurring the line between rankings and ads, more users will leave Google search jump over to Bing.
