Princess Zelda: Link Building for Legends

Yesterday, I posted about some confusion regarding a mysterious link in my Gmail header that did an “ask jeeves search” inquiry in Bing. While I was doing this sleuthing around, I found some other interesting search results that I thought deserved their own separate blog post.

What I found makes it look like there’s a silent war going on between the competing search engines. I tried doing a search on Bing for “google” and got this interesting result:

The description reads, “Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping…” It makes Google sound like their biggest priority is making money from ads, which is true in a sense, but they can only make money from ads by retaining searchers, and they only do that by being a great search engine. The term “search engine” isn’t even in this description, although they do note that the advertising is “related to its Internet search”.

Granted, this is the official encyclopedia definition for Google, so maybe it is warranted. However, that is the definition for Google as a company, not Google’s search engine. The encyclopedia entry for Google search reads, “Google search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the Web.” I wonder why they wouldn’t want to use that definition? Maybe because it advertises a clearly more popular search engine than Bing? Hmm.

But then I thought, that’s not really playing fair. I’m not much looking at other definitions, am I? So I did a Google search for “google” to see what they define themselves as.

I searched on Google for the popular search engine.

Well, since google.com doesn’t have a meta description, it just pulls the text from the site. That’s pretty boring. But wait, what’s that news story being displayed? It’s a recent article from Dave Methvin on InformationWeek’s weblog entitled, “Why I’m Dropping Bing for Google“. If you repeat the search today you won’t see it, so I’m positive that this was just sheer coincidence. I still got a good laugh out of it, though!

It seemed only fair to repeat the treatment for Bing. I then did a Bing search for “bing”.

I searched Bing for themselves.

A much more flattering description for Bing! But what’s up with those news results? Even Bing assumes you aren’t really looking for Bing. Today the news is all related to Bing the search engine, in all fairness. This begs the question: how does a Google search for “bing” turn out?

I just about died laughing when I saw this. Again, none of this may be intentional, but I sure got a good ride off of it! They show Bing’s description for themselves, but a cached link for Bing Travel makes it look like it is out of service for the moment – although when you actually visit Bing Travel they seem to be running. The results are still like this today, which makes me wonder why Google has this page cached and not Bing local or Images. Is Bing Travel really that popular, or is this another great joke from Google?

And then of course, Google announced the development of their new operating system, Google Chrome OS. Is this another stab at Bing from Google, or just another coincidence on the pile? If you want to read more on this topic, I wrote an article on the SEO 101 blog entitled, “Google ‘Pulls a Bing’ by Nudging Into Microsoft’s OS Monopoly“. Enjoy!

What do you think? Have you seen anything strange from these two internet giants? I’d love to hear your thoughts!