2009 June, 25th

Mihaela Lica

The first search engine startup to accuse Microsoft/Bing of copying something was the now-mostly obscured semantic search engine hakia, which back in 2007 when it officially launched showed great potential. Unfortunately some PR and developmental blunders left hakia behind their main rival in search, Powerset, which sold to Microsoft, thus becoming the basis for what we now know as Bing.

hakia stated on the company blog that:

Our goal has always been to take search beyond 10 blue links. It was then no surprise when Microsoft invited us to show them the inner workings of the hakia Galleries in July 2008- shortly after their acquisition of Powerset. But it was a huge surprise to recently find out that Microsoft introduced categorized search in Bing.

Of course, one may ask, why was hakia so naïve as to show Microsoft the technology behind the hakia Galleries, but this is not the point. There is a simple explanation: probably hakia had hoped to sell to Microsoft, following their main competitor’s example.

Today however, another search entity makes the headlines, accusing Bing of plagiarism: Kayak. Kayak is a multi-airline airfare search engine, which is very popular in the US. The travel search engine discovered that Bing’s travel results looks very much like Kayak’s and that this is confusing Kayak’s users.

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

Kayak sent Microsoft a legal letter explaining this problem last week, and Microsoft’s response was:

“Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.” – Microsoft’s Whitney Burk told Wired.com.

In translation, Microsoft denies that the obvious similarity between Bing travel and Kayak is the result of breach of copyright. But when Bing launched, expert analysts noted that there was an obvious similarity (which was probably the basis for Kayak’s recent move).

If local search is something of a letdown, Bing’s travel search is a clear winner that sets it far ahead of Yahoo and Google. In fact, it’s a full-on reservation search engine whose interface seems uncomfortably close to Kayak.com’s. (quote from Wired.com)

To be honest, when hakia first published their complaint about Microsoft stealing the categorized search idea I chose to ignore it, because I am personally biased. My partner Phil Butler supported hakia avidly in the past, in a time when I didn’t believe in their chances to succeed, because of their obvious PR mistakes, which I dared to criticize in a post on my personal blog. This led to a “parting of the ways” between Phil and hakia – needless to say hakia made nearly all the changes I suggested in that blog post, and in a PR proposal sent by Phil in Pamil Visions’ name, without giving us any credit. So when hakia came whining about Microsoft copying their ideas, I said to myself: “now you know what it feels like” and “what goes around, comes around.”

But now, seeing that others are also affected by Microsoft’s lack of professional courtesy, I can only feel sorry for hakia and Kayak, and God knows how many other smaller players. It’s sad to see how the big corporations eliminate chances for the smaller ones, how they glean ideas, pirate hard work, and how they scatter dreams.

hakia has reason to complain on the face of this, as does Kayak. The problem for hakia in particular is systemic of many technological startup companies. The possibility hakia exhibited was in AI (artificial intelligence) and true semantic technology. At a point, just before my mentioned post, hakia diverged from the core technology and into a realm which could never have differentiated them much anyway – organizational search methodology. This is what made Powerset so intriguing to Microsoft, and is, in the end, what Bing is all about. Kayak, like hakia and others, are now on the losing end of a battle for their own ideas, with only the hope of some compensation in front of their developers and investors.

Bing vs. Kayak image courtesy Douglas Sims.

• 2010/01/21 -- The State of Bing Search Engine Address
• 2009/06/15 -- Is Google Afraid of Bing?
• 2009/06/08 -- Waggener Edstom Given World’s Toughest PR Task! Selling Bing
• 2009/05/29 -- Microsoft’s Loudest PR Campaign in Years: It’s Binging
• 2009/05/26 -- Microsoft, You Got Binged
• 2009/10/03 -- Bing Drops the PR Hype, and so Does Its Search Market Share
• 2009/06/23 -- PR Strategies: Microsoft’s “Will Code for Green” Challenge

About the Author

Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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