Today on Google Plus, Andy Arnt – a software engineer at Google – posted about two Bing “Easter Eggs” that take shots at Google, searches that take digs at Google in the answers that show at the top of Bing’s results.

The two search queries in question are more evil than satan himself  and hiybbprqag. For each search, there’s a special negative message that appears at the top of the page, messages that could only have happened through Bing deliberately inserting them.

More Evil Than Satan

The query more evil than satan himself returns a result of:

10^100

As you can see below:

This is, of course, is the number that is equivalent to a googol, what Google is loosely named after. But why the phrase “more evil than satan” to trigger this?

That exact term was actually a query of controversy almost 12 years ago. In 1999, when a search was conducted on Google for “more evil than satan” the Microsoft website showed up as the number one result.

While some thought this was a deliberate Easter Egg,  Google had debunked the issue by stating that the anchor text to the Microsoft site was simply evil-heavy.

Hiybbprqag

The other query that has an Easter egg is  hiybbprqag and is in reference to the Bing-copying-Google ”Copygate” scandal earlier this year. The word was on that Google made up as part of its “sting operation” to see if Bing would copy some of its results. Bing disputed that it copied any results, saying similarities were due to clickstream data it gathered generally.

It looks like someone at Bing is still holding a grudge about the claims, as the results for the search at Bing show this:

hiybbprqag (orcish) = whiner (common)

Here’s the screenshot:

At the bottom of that screenshot, you can see references to comedian Stephen Colbert. That’s because Colbert — whose show is sponsored by Bing — poked fun at Bing after the Copygate issue happened, giving his own definition for the word “iybbprqag,” saying as we covered previously, that it’s a word “meaning you got served.” Here’s his sketch:

This has been active for the past 7+ hours and will be interesting to see how long it lasts.

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

About The Author: Greg Finn is the Chief Marketing Officer for Cypress North, a company that specializes in social media and search marketing services and web-based application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 6+ years and specializes in Social Media Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn. See more articles by Greg Finn

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