Hacker News Reader

Even if they are susceptible to Google bombing, I don't think Google would reduce the quality of it's results for real searches because of this.

Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.

View on HN

They're not just susceptible to Google bombing. They are at the mercy of some easy to automate SEO with the bing toolbar installed. If I were a black hat I'd install the bing toolbar, craft some perhaps human looking Selenium code, and start the clicking. Over a period of a few weeks I'd be owning the top results in Bing.

I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.

I think that you have identified the biggest flaw with Microsoft's approach.

They are also susceptible to Google "poisoning" the well, by creating a bot-net to provide fake data to Bing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com