
How a Fake Island Landed on Google Earth - MarlonPro
http://news.yahoo.com/fake-island-landed-google-earth-134221769.html
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a_p
This seems to be a harmless case of erroneous old information slipping in
because it was not stricken from all maps many years ago. However, it is not
unusual for many maps to all contain the same mistake. Cartographers have been
known to include small mistakes in their maps to catch people who copy their
work. In the past, even if another cartographer found information on a map to
be inaccurate, they would not always correct it completely, for similar
reasons to why the value of the charge of an electron in Millikan oil drop
experiment took years to correct.

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pc86
Google did something similar to prove that Bing was just copying SERPs if I
remember correctly.

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scottru
That's right - they seeded nonsense queries with very specific results.
Working assumption is that Bing was integrating clickstream data (either from
ISPs or from the MSN Toolbar) into their results.

<http://www.wired.com/business/2011/02/bing-copies-google/>

