A researcher who has accused Google of bias says the internet giant is now waging a campaign to discredit him.
Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a study this week claiming Google boosts its own products in search results.
The Californian company responded by suggesting he was actually working on behalf of its rival, Microsoft.
But Mr Edelman told the BBC that Google was launching "personal attacks" to distract people from its own behaviour.
"I don't mind personal attacks, to be honest, because I think it shows they can't argue against the research," said the associate professor.
"That's what they've done to most of my recent research."
His study, "Measuring Bias in Organic Web Search", was conducted in August last year alongside Harvard colleague Benjamin Lockwood and published on Wednesday.
It would help Edelman's credibility if he categorically denied being paid by Microsoft for this particular research and its publication, no matter his earlier association with Redmond. Otherwise his credibility does suffer, and it just looks like a public relations war.
goodroi
5:40 pm on Jan 21, 2011 (gmt 0)
his research seems to be a bit manipulated. he is basing a very strong claim against google after testing only 32 keywords. i can easily find 32 keywords that will make it appear bing to have extreme bias towards microsoft products.
for example if i search for "office" on bing, the #1 site is microsoft.com while google ranks the office tv show #1.
another interesting keyword is if i search for "spreadsheet". bing ranks google docs #2. when your competition ranks your service #2 it says your service is relevant and discredits the bias theory.
i suspect this debate about bias will not go away anytime soon. i also suspect there will be little scientific research to prove it one way or another unless you count the research that bing & google will likely pay for in order to prove their points.
FranticFish
11:59 pm on Jan 21, 2011 (gmt 0)
Searching for 'Excel' in Google gave me a London conference centre with the software second. I'm not in London, and my default is for web results not UK. I'm logged out and I've not searched for conferences in living memory. Maybe they're trying to nark MSN just a little bit :)
Lorel
12:30 am on Jan 22, 2011 (gmt 0)
He also needs to study up on SEO. He has too much info on his home page watering down his major keywords and lousy navigation on the site.
FranticFish
1:25 am on Jan 22, 2011 (gmt 0)
Yeah, he might not care about on-page SEO but the nav is awful. Breadcrumb anyone? No, let's just have a back to home link and you can work it out from there...
