09.02.09

Microsoft’s Bing Spams Web Sites with Referrer SPAM and Net Applications Lies Again

Posted in America, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Search at 3:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Net Applications

Summary: Grey- and black-hat behaviour from Microsoft and its surveying allies

THE FOLLOWING bad behaviour should not be entirely surprising because it’s merely inherited from the previous public identity of "Bing", which is just Live/MSN renamed and rewrapped.

Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand?

For over two years now, Microsoft’s search engine has been generating fake information that can make site owners think they’re getting strange search traffic (including porn traffic), when they are not. It’s time for this to come to an end.

The culprit? Microsoft’s “crawler,” the software that visits web pages across the web that go into the search engine. The crawler is known as MSNBot, from the days when the recently renamed Bing search engine was known as MSN Search. When that crawler gathers a web page, it sometimes leaves behind “referrer” information in a web site’s logs — fake referrer information, that is.

There are many other serious issues with Microsoft’s search, including antitrust issues. Regarding those “Screw Google” meetings (part of a trend [1, 2, 3, 4]), which Microsoft is now denying, Simon Phipps writes:

Of course, every company is using its spending power to lobby in DC so while this alleged activity is completely in character, I fully expect that other businesses are engaging actively in similar anti-competitive lobbying in both Washington and Brussels. I heard rumours that certain Oracle competitiors were encouraging the US and EU authorities to engage in long investigations of the Sun acquisition, for example. No data, but it’s to be expected. The best solution? Bringing it out into the daylight and requiring all lobbying activity to be documented.

Looking at a global scope, Microsoft’s chance of advancing is rather pitiful. We previously wrote quite a lot about how Microsoft cites US-only figures to give the illusion of potency. But US-only data is bound to magnify the dominance of Windows and Microsoft by almost an order of magnitude (when measured in terms of relative market share to GNU/Linux, for instance). According to one survey where there is no Microsoft money on the table, Microsoft’s global market share is only about 3% in search (and apparently declining, still).

Worldwide Microsoft and Yahoo combined grabbed 8.42 percent of the search market in August, a decline of 0.35 percent from July (8.77%). Google remains then leader in the global search market with 89.57 percent in August (89.23% in July).

Now, that paints a totally different picture, does it not?

Tony Manco drew attention to this, adding that “Net Applications lies again.” We wrote about this subject extensively. Google is not a customer of Net Applications, unlike Opera, Microsoft, and Apple. “Net Applications made some post today stating that Bing and Vista 7 are growing,” adds Tony Manco. Sounds promotional, does it not? Read the following to see why it is not surprising:

Given that Microsoft commands only about 3% of the search queries (globally), what is this latest nonsense from Net Applications? Is it an advertisement for their client, Microsoft? comScore does the same thing after signing a deal with Microsoft [1, 2, 3]. “The catch is that on the search engine pie chart you can see Google has about 75%, everybody knows that those values are US-only,” writes Manco. “Same applies to their horrible OS share numbers,” he adds. When will people stop citing Net Applications numbers then?

“It’s US-only and they want people to believe it’s global,” concludes Manco. Over at TG Daily, Microsoft sockpuppet Andrew Thomas is already using the latest Net Applications data to slander GNU/Linux by saying that Vista 7 exceeds its market share. They lie with sincerity, always. █

Steve Ballmer’s presentation slide
from 2009 shows GNU/Linux as bigger than Apple on the desktop (globally)