[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Microsoft is taking up online arms against Google with a ‘Don’t Get Scroogled‘ campaign. The campaign pits Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, against Google Shopping. No Aunt Sally, it is not Google Bing is up in arms against, it is Google Shopping.  And kudos to the copy writing team that came up with the portmanteau word ‘Scroogled’. Screwed by Google, never sounded better!

The national campaign to highlight Bing’s commitment to honest search results and explains to consumers the risks of Google Shopping’s newly announced “pay-to-rank” practice, in which the shopping search results customers see are not true search results such as they see elsewhere on Google; they are actually ads that are ranked, in part, by who pays the most.

“Instead of showing you the most relevant shopping search results for the latest coffee maker you’re looking to buy mom, Google’s new redesigned shopping vertical now decides what to show you — and how prominently to display what product offers they show — based partially on how much a merchant selling the product has paid Google,” says the Bing campaign.

We won’t let who pays us for ads or other services affect what you see in your shopping search results. Search results are one thing; ads are another.

We won’t switch to pay-to-rank to allow fees to influence the ranking of shopping search results. In short, we think that too many shoppers who use Google for their shopping are getting “Scroogled” when they should be getting fair, honest, open search results.

Here is another excerpt from an official release by Microsoft:

In recent weeks leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Google quietly changed its shopping results from “Google Product Search,” which represented fairly comprehensive results for products and merchants across the Web, to a pay-to-rank model called “Product Listing Advertising.” Merchants must now pay Google to be listed in the shopping results, and how much they pay helps determine how they appear in the rankings, so now every “result” is really just an ad. This new policy means consumers are getting Scroogled.

The campaign will be continuing throughout the holiday shopping season, and Bing-sponsored Don’t Get Scroogled activities will appear online and offline. Bing is also calling on Google to stop this “pay-to-rank” system for their shopping results.