If I gave a monkey’s about traffic to this site [[actually I do.  I actively try to keep it to a manageable trickle]] then putting the word Hiybbprqag into a post title could be a way to do it, or at least it would have been yesterday.  The readership will now split into two: those who haven’t got a clue what I’m going on about and the nerds.

For the nerds it is all quite exciting:  Google are accusing Microsoft of using results from Google to inform their own search engine Bing’s results.  Or something like that.  There is more to it than that, and if anybody is interested they can read all about it here.

I read about it last night, how Google had wangled it so that the search for the made-up word Hiybbprqag would generate a single result, about seating arrangements in an LA theatre, on Google.  After running that search a few times, using only Microsoft’s browser, they ran the same search in Microsoft’s Bing and got the same single result.

This morning I tried the same search at work and got 267 results.  Most were stories on tech blogs and news sites about the accusations, but quite a few were for a Surrey-based classified ads site who had the foresight to put Hiybbprqag into their metadata.

Tonight, a mere twelve hours or so later, I ran the search again and got 119,000 results.  Not bad for a word that was invented recently and only unveiled to the world yesterday.  I even noticed that one result was for a site with the address hiybbprqag.com.

At first I was impressed that somebody (in Taiwan) had got the domain registered so quickly, but it turns out the domain re-directs straight to a Google.com recruitment page.  Someone is having fun with this…

I expect the film rights of the whole affair are currently being auctioned in Hollywood somewhere as a sort of companion piece to the Facebook film.

My first instinctive reaction when I read about it yesterday was that Google had got Microsoft bang to rights, but thinking about it I do wonder if Microsoft have done anything wrong.  After all Google publish APIs for just about everything so should they be so upset if somebody uses them?

Or is it not as simple as that?