Tristan Savatier, aka loupiote, spotted an interesting issue with Google indexing and displaying Bing’s image cached results in the Google Image search index.
He posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help explaining that he found 8 million or so of the Bing search-engine cached thumbnail images being indexed by Google Image search. He then linked to this allinurl command that shows images that contain “mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx” in the URL.
New Googler, Gary Illyes, explained the reason Google is indexing the content is because neither Bing or the original site are blocking Google from indexing it.
Two issues with this:
(1) Google has gone on record about them not wanting to have search results in their search results.
(2) Remember a few months ago, Google accused Bing of cheating because they were sniffing their keyword searches and results?
As the forum complaint went:
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Google seems to have now removed the images despite Bing not preventing the crawl of those images in the robots.txt file.
A Google spokesperson sent us the following statement:
