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Comment by neild | Hacker News Reader

The number-one point I take away from this isn't about ethics or what is "right".

It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.

They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.

That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.

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Disclosure: I'm interning in the Bing team at MS but my statements here are mine only and do not reflect that of Microsoft.

I don't see how this indicates that they've given up on Bing. They're spending a lot of money on the online services team, even making a loss for the past several quarters to improve Bing. They're playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive while they get their algorithms up to scratch. It's better than the alternative of loosing all their customers/market share and then have no data to help them improve.

I see this more as a compliment to Google, even though Google certainly doesn't see it that way, and I can definitely understand their frustration.

"[Bing is] playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive"

Since you're interning in the Bing team, I'll ask: did a lot of people at Bing know about Google's rankings as a data source in Bing? I'll understand if you can't answer, but I'm genuinely curious.

They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.

Sounds like a very rational position. Anything less could be termed 'delusion' on Microsoft's part. And for the longest time, they were delusion about the search market in general. No longer.

They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.

Google being an additional source of data for them does not equal Bing "giving up on bettering Google".

However, you really can't blame Google for pointing out the fact that when you're using Bing, some portion of the time, you're in fact getting stale Google search results.

Agreed.

This is not correct; the algorithms use to produce search results rely on user input over time. The proper rewording is "They've decided that, some portionof the time, the single best searchresults they can returns is whatever users are using.

If you have no information about a URL, algorithms aren't going to help you. In that case, falling through to what your competitor has indexed seems like a pretty smart idea. I don't really understand all the hand-wringing.

Maybe the explanation is simpler than that. Perhaps they do trust their own algorithms, but their algorithms contain vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit. Maybe Google figured out how to use this weakness to manipulate Bing's results then spin it to make it look like Bing is stealing from Google. Google certainly knows many of the pitfalls a startup search engine will face. And anyone who's ever had to decipher the madness of msnbot in web logs over the years can tell you the Microsoft search engine team has made some monumental blunders that weren't intentionally malicious. In fact, Google may have just helped Bing by exposing a weakness that they can now patch.

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