David Friedberg says Google basically used to ‘distill’ Microsoft and Yahoo “At Google, in the early days, we would submit millions of search queries to Yahoo and Microsoft search engines to see what the result sets were. We would compare our results against theirs as a way of improving our search engine rankings and our algorithm.” “It was a very common technique. It doesn’t mean we were stealing their algorithm. We didn’t go into their servers and steal their software. We looked at the output of their software and used that to improve our software.”