Bing: What's More Evil Than Satan Himself? 10^100

Not too long ago, hiybbprqag wasn’t much of a word, but as Google employee Andy Arnt noticed today, if you search Bing for it these days, you will find that it is an “orcish” word meaning “whiner.” Unless you’ve been closely following the search engine competition between Microsoft and Google, this probably doesn’t make much sense to you, but this little easter egg is actually quite funny.

Update: Looks like Microsoft has removed these search results now.

Here is why: Earlier this year, Google alleged that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was copying its search results. To prove this, Google inserted fake search results for nonsense words like hiybbprqag, indoswiftjobinproductionand mbzrxpgjys into its index and, indeed, the fake search results later appeared on Bing.

Google then went public with the findings of its sting operation and publicly accused Microsoft of piggybacking on its search results. Microsoft argued that there is perfectly good reason for this: users who opt-in to sharing anonymous data with the company (including the fake Google users who searched for these terms), will share this data with Bing and the search engine will hence use it.

What’s More Evil Than Satan?

Besides the new definition for “hiybbprqag,” Arnt also found that Bing now defines the search for “more evil than satan himself” as 10^100 – a Googol, the word the Google founders used as the basis of their company’s name. The story behind this actually goes back all the way to 1999, when one of the first successful Google bombing campaigns (the great-grandfather of today’s SpreadingSantorum.com) catapulted Microsoft’s homepage to be the top search result for this query on Google. The big difference between a Google bombing and these results, though, is that these definitions were obviously chosen by the Bing team and not the result of an errant algorithm.