Microsoft has vehemently denied that its Bing search engine copies results from Google in order to give users the most accurate search experience.

"We do not copy results from competitors. Period. Full stop," wrote Yusuf Mehdi, senior VP for Microsoft's online services division, in a blog post last week.

Mehdi's post was in response to Google's allegation that Bing engineers monitor search traffic and results on the Google search engine and tweak their own rankings accordingly. But Mehdi said the accusation is hogwash.

"We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting," said Mehdi.

The tiff began last week after the blog Search Engine Land published a story that quoted Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who said Google created a "honey pot" to catch Bing's alleged cheaters.

Google engineers manually inflated the rankings of certain pages for several highly obscure search terms. They claimed Bing's ranking of those pages also shot up shortly after they began their experiment—proving, they insisted, that Bing was copying Google search results.