Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.
I'm certainly an odd one here, but I'm more inclined to use the Bing toolbar due to this, although the perf cost is still too high to use any toolbar, IMO.
What would be nice is if the browsers had an open format of your browsing history that you can send to providers of your choice...
The far extreme of evasion, certainly, but the narrowness of his definition of "sexual relationships" seems in the same ballpark as the narrowness of Microsoft's definition of "copy."
He employed a very narrow definition of "sexual relations" that was made possible by the ambiguity of what a sexual relationship actually is.
With 25+ years in the word processor business Microsoft certainly has significant experience with spell check and algorithmically deciphering bungled words - The claim that Google has better code for deciphering jumbled spelling is not self-evident.
This only implies inferior technology if this is the only signal you have in determining relevance, but clearly they have tons of them.
The fact that they're trying to capture the totality of the user experience is a very good thing (again with opt-in). Search relevance hasn't progressed as it should. But I think if they could use my web browsing habits it would increase a fair bit.
And lastly, Bing and Google are near parity, but not identical. I don't think anyone is under any allusions that neither engine could learn a thing or two from the other.
It's not about inferior or not, but trying to get better.
I would expect to see spammers sending many thousands/millions of clicks on specific Google search results through Bing's Toolbar for long-tail queries.
(Although I suppose you could hack the toolbar and send the data manually.)
Personally, as someone who's held MS stock for a while, I kind of find this tactic to be deviously brilliant. For a dog thats been back in the race for a while I'm okay with them leveraging every angle they have to catch up. There's a ton of mindshare to compete with at Google. This seems to be a fairly effective short cut for Microsoft.
I think I'd see things your way more if this were two competing, resource constrained startups. But if its two 800lb gorillas going at it I'm going to have fun watching them trade blows and see how it turns out. Playing "fair" doesn't matter as much to me in this case.
But that's just my perspective - everyone will see this differently I'm sure.
But for a lot of people this is going to sound like, "Google catches Bing cheating". And for a lot of people this is going to sound like, "Google complains about competitor Bing".
Given where Bing mindshare and marketshare is today versus its search qualty, I think this isn't a horrible place to be. Esepcially if it gets people to say, "Let me try a query on Google and Bing and see who is copying?" or to simply see what the hoopla is about.
And Google made a mistake when they worked with Danny in getting this story out too. It should have been "Microsoft copies", not "Bing copies".
"Bing is too weak to stand on its own and it knows it, so it cheats."
I do not think the court of public opinion is going to let go of the word "cheating" so rapidly. It's a toxic word, and whether or not you think it's true it's supported well enough that it won't matter.
He didn't know anything about, in this case, actual fraudalant and illegal practices. And this was a much bigger story at the time than this is likely to be, by orders of magnitude.
Most people, to this day, think that MS was sued because they were a monopoly. Not because of illegal practices while a monopoly.
Given that its Google bringing the charges, and not the DOJ, I think also weakens it.
And lastly, the fact that it's not illegal, also makes it look like whining. Steroids are illegal and generally considered really bad, and the American public hardly cares about that. If Barry Bonds was a nicer guy the public may well have demanded they make steroids legal! :-)
My point, since I rambled, this will be more he said/she said. And less one sided than I think you believe.
Google leverages every legal scrap of information they can get their hands on to improve their services – including the outlinks of every site they crawl, and clicks of users all over the net. If there's a legal way to observe the users and content of Google's sites for info about which other sites are good – and I haven't yet seen an allegation from Google that Microsoft is doing something illegal – why should any company refrain from using those signals, given Google's giant use of such info from elsewhere?
Their method, when no data is available for a search term, is to sometimes (7 out of 100?) rely on human ranked results (in this case gamed by Google) via user behavior gathered with their toolbar.
It'd be interesting to find out if Bing was only using behavioral results of Google users or they recorded behavior by users of all search engines. Unfortunately, Google don't seem to have conducted an A/B test to find out, so it ended up with confirmation bias.
Finally, what I find interesting is that Google basically broke what they claim to be their prime directive - not hard coding search rankings - for PR purposes. There isn't a good story behind that either way. Either approval came from the top, in which case senior management broke the directive to embarrass a competitor or it was broken by cowboys outside of management control. Of course it is also possible that this sort of thing is done regularly within the course of business.
[Aside] I want to be the first to dub this "Binggate."
If you consider setting up a honeypot on a term with no hits to really be going against the "not hard coding search rankings" in any meaningful way, you are most likely some sort of obscure Bing ultra-partisan.
The fact that Google's operation only succeeded with 7 out of 100 honeypots is telling evidence that Microsoft is explicitly trying not to do what Google is accusing it of doing given the scale of Google's operation.
This has nothing to do with Bing. Google's Prime Directive is their promise and no one else's. The fundamental nature of a promise is that it breaking it is not excused by "the ends justify the means."
However, some people may consider a promise to be breakable under extraordinary circumstances. I won't disagree that such a belief can be considered reasonable. But the circumstances under which Google violated their Prime Directive are hardly extraordinary - dragging Microsoft through the mud at a search conference
Search engines learn a lot from their users. Think of spelling corrections, part of them are learned from users that typed both the mispelled and correct query in the same session.
Like in this case, many times better results don't come from better technology, but from a bigger userbase that gives more data to learn from.
Google has almost an order of magnitude more users than Bing, hence an enormous amount of data to learn from.
IMHO what Bing is doing is a way to tap a (biased, incomplete) part of that data (that also Google has, in their clicklogs) to use it as a signal for crawling and ranking.
This isn't innovation. Any fool can write something that copies data from a competitor.
Ahh... the innovation is not in the "content", but how the content is determined. Google crawls the web, copying content, creates and index, and a sophisticated formula for determining relevance of search.
MS has innovated by taking this one step further by saying, "if you opt-in we'll use your behavior as part of our index and relevance metric". So they no more copied from Google than Google copies from CNN. But in the same way Google has created value from mined data, Bing has created value from mined opt-in user behavior. That's the innovation.
If one can't see that, I think most of these places would do a "no hire" in any case.
That is why I disagree that this is harmful to potential employees. I'd no sooner want to work for someone who thought this indicated inferior technology as they'd want me to work with them.
> "Like how Google copies the titles of web pages and snippets and puts them in search results?"
Google copies parts of web pages to benefit the website. To send traffic to them. It's beneficial to both parties which is opt-out by the webmaster.
How does Google benefit from Bing copying their search results? They don't. How can Google opt-out of Bing doing it? They can't.
Bing copying other search engines results is throwing down the gauntlet and stooping to desperation. It's MS announcing "we are not a technology company" - something I think would put off candidates who want to work at a technology company.
You might find it all morally acceptable, or even impressive. I don't.
Google can block Bing from crawling the search results, which it does. But Google does NOT OWN what the user typed, nor the URL the user goes to.
If MS is scraping the page that's one thing. But if MS is using information provided by the user that the user has given them permission to use, then it is completely fine.
I find it morally acceptable and impressive.
EDIT: Google could block users that have the Bing toolbar installed from using Google search.
It's such a bold claim, and with such an obvious explanation - Bing use all kinds of click data, whether from Google or not. Did they really not realise that was what was happening, or did they think "this is a certain PR win". Or do they just not have control of what their people say in public?
It's like if MS had discovered googlebombing and used it to 'show' that Google were 'copying' from webpages, or worse assumed that Google were manipulating search results.
I think Harry was exactly correct to describe this as a new kind of click fraud, and Google's handling of their discovery of it just amazes me.
http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
If that is indeed the case, then they are not copying results from Google, they are just tracking users' choices to improve position of interesting results on Bing. Personally, I don't see anything wrong about that.
Keep in mind that in Google's experiment, they always clicked on the first result, which is probably why their result was send to Microsoft and that the experiment "succeeded".
They're trying to link Content A and Content B, where "Content" includes page content, URL(including GET string terms), and various other factors. Could happen on every page.
Google-fans then tend to get a bit knicker-twisty about privacy implications, but first I dislike that line of argument as it confuses the issue (what are we mad at, the copying or the privacy? Oh I know, we'll say copying and when someone rebuts that we'll start whining about privacy), and secondly, as patio11 eloquently said: Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165682 )
I, however, would call it spyware.
For synthetic words like "hiybbprqag" that rarely/never show up on the internet [except on Google search result pages generated by Google engineers systematically searching for it], the basic probability algorithm would weight heavily towards assuming an association between "hiybbprqag" and the destination URLs viewed by people immediately after looking at pages referencing "hiybbprqag". Since probably the only people looking at pages referencing "hiybbprqag" were Google testers searching for it, who had been instructed to always click on the "synthetic" Google result, the probability of someone viewing a page referencing "hiybbprqag" subsequently going to http://www.teamonetickets....wiltern-map.html* would be close to 1 - suggesting a pretty strong association between the terms.
If you incorporated these associations into the Bing search engine in any way, it would be perfectly reasonable for a search engine to assume that that page is the most relevant result for hiybbprqag*, given the lack of any alternative data on what to show.
Obviously this isn't as simple as the other solution (and Google could have done more sophisticated tests which rule out this kind of algorithm as being behind the results), but the competitive end of search isn't simple.
How would it differentiate between a form submission and a search? And if it's not and still sending all of that data back to MS, that's far more disconcerting than them just watching me on Google.
It's certainly more believable that the sites were either targeted or were extracted from massive amounts of data for this purpose.
Do they gentlemanly ignore clickstreams on competitor web sites?
Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown.
This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. But that's not what today's news is about.
A very weak 'reply' from Microsoft which again seems to pretty much confirm that they ARE 'looking at' certain Google results.
Which is untrue. They are nowhere near as good.
EDIT: I found the post:
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...
Reading the whole thing it seems like he pretty much admitted copying Google's search results through users of the Google toolbar. He calls it "collective intelligence."
"We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"
What's the difference to what Google does by e.g. using newspaper articles in a "creative" way (by not only showing them in the search results, but by combining them to a new type of newspaper at news.google.com)?
Indeed, my 11 year old sister loves typing in silly search terms such as "stroobaray pai" and laughing about the fact that Google actually figured out what she meant :-)
Company A produces product 1.
Company B produces product 2 inferior to product 1.
Consumers use product 1.
Company B enhances product 2 by actively engaging product 1.
Some consumers use product 2.
Company B product 2 rises in market share.
More consumers user product 2.
Company A drops product 1 due to lack of profits.
Product 2 quality deteriorates due to absence of product 1.
Consumers left with inferior product option."Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." -Picasso
(the above is just my interpretation).
Is there a pattern here?
But he does have a fraction of a point.
It is possible, however, to arrive at a right conclusion through incorrect reasoning.
- optimization for SunSpider [1]
- now scrapping google SERP
Curious what is next? Linux code is in Win7?