February is off to a great start in the world of search. Yesterday, Google went public via Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land with their very compelling claim that Bing is copying their search results by using data collected from the Bing toolbar and the Suggested Sites feature. To summarize, Google thought that Bing was copying their search results so they set up a honeypot by purposely ranking sites on queries that no one would search for and then waiting to see if the results were copied over to Bing. And, what do you know, they were.

I expect we will see, at the very least, an update to IE8′s privacy policy and definitely some sort of tactic by Google to counteract this sort of thing. Do you thing this is an acceptable business tactic? Bing continues to be a loss for MS so is this an act of desperation? And with long-tail Google results being over-run with large spam networks, why would they want to bother copying them?