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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

> At first I thought there could be three possible explanations to Google’s handling of this situation:

I think he forgot option 5: whether Bing intentionally copied Google's search results or not, if Bing continues this practice then their index will contain a de facto copy of Google's index for tricky queries. Bing will inherit Google's spelling correction, it's long tail, its top results, and any other enhancements Google develops to return more relevant results.

Google invests so much into these things; if Bing absorbs these improvements without lifting a finger, Google loses its ability to stay ahead through technical merit and innovation.

I think Amit is telling the truth: "And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

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I think i would put it more succinctly this way:

Bing and it's boosters have been touting their search engine results as better and more relevant than Google's. As it turns out, the reason for that, is because they are tracking all of Google's results without reporting that they are doing so.

Additionally, the article posted here is disingenuous. There is a difference between tracking general click tracking, and what bing is doing, which is scraping queries and click results. That is not a general browsing feature, this is a search engine specific feature, designed to benefit off of the results provided by others.

How do you know its the former and not the other. Google's experiment doesn't discriminate between the two.

Does the Bing toolbar algorithm associate all query string parameters with the subsequent click action? Or did the Bing algorithm toolbar have code that specifically targeted click actions on the Google search engine?

Was it just the top result that was copied or were more of the results copied as well?

Sorry you're right. The other possibility is that bing is scraping the query term and all of the links out of the search page, and correlating them immediately. That means they're totally susceptible to google bombing (which is in effect what google did).

The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.

Even if they are susceptible to Google bombing, I don't think Google would reduce the quality of it's results for real searches because of this.

Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.

They're not just susceptible to Google bombing. They are at the mercy of some easy to automate SEO with the bing toolbar installed. If I were a black hat I'd install the bing toolbar, craft some perhaps human looking Selenium code, and start the clicking. Over a period of a few weeks I'd be owning the top results in Bing.

I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.

I think that you have identified the biggest flaw with Microsoft's approach.

They are also susceptible to Google "poisoning" the well, by creating a bot-net to provide fake data to Bing.

To scrape, wouldn't Microsoft need to be following up to the followed clicks by sending a search query to Google? If that was happening, I'm pretty sure that Google would have said so.

The scraping could be done client side, after users perform the search, just send all the data to MS.

It would be interesting to see where the law comes down on tracking clicks for a competitive advantage. I doubt anything will get past handbags at dawn, as it could draw attention to click tracking on ads, and no-one want that.

Good point. This would require that the Bing toolbar be sending requests to Google, right?

I don't think this is as unethical as you say. I sincerely believe all Bing is doing is using the toolbar to get (long) search trails.

Using search trails is a near-standard practice--to guess intent, find deep links, yada yada. Does Google want Bing to special-case links going out from their site? Or all search-engines maybe? What about techniques like this? http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf

The paper authors sure call it innovative, not cheating :) (Also, techniques like this search+wrapper are great for Product Search, and I'd be surprised if Google doesn't use them).

I think Google's stance is rather unfair. While Bing may have "copied" results, I feel this was just a side-effect of trying to build a good index, rather than a case of "oooh.... let's see what's google returns for this, and just copy the result").

I disagree with you and agree with the author of the blog post. Microsoft is not copying Google's search results, rather, they use behaviour of their Bing toolbar users as one signal for their own ranking. And, if clicking through the Google SERPs was the only signal for certain made up search term, then it appears like copying the Google's results. But technically it's not.

I wonder if this can be tested somehow, just like Google did.

Sure. As Harry Shum said; this is a new kind of clickfraud. Just like when googlebombing become a public technique, Google would have been foolish not to change the behaviour of their algorithm. I'd be amazed if Bing didn't swiftly change their click tracking behaviour to explicitly blacklist google.

And if Google had waited for Bing to reply privately before making any of this public, I'm sure we'd have avoided all this drama.

It's nice that Google would like Microsoft to stop copying them. Everyone else who generates unique content (news site articles, TripAdvisor reviews) would like Google to stop copying their content into Google News and Google Places.

Apparently Google only cares about sites copying other sites content when their it's their own stuff getting copied.

Any site that wants Google to stop copying their content to Google news can ask Google news to stop doing so. It's very simple.

The real issue is that they don't want their content in Google News, but they also don't want to kill the golden goose that is directing traffic to their site. I.e. Google News is generating traffic for them, but they don't want the content to be on Google News either. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

edit: 'they' here refers to the old media newspapers, more specifically to Mr. Murdoch.

There's a big difference between copying content and linking to content. I don't think anyone has a problem with Google linking to them: that is after all the purpose of a search engine. But Google doesn't just link, they copy full content into their site, giving users no reason to click through to the original creator.

And Google doesn't let creators opt-out of just the content-stealing part of their scheme. If you want to be indexed by Google, you have to allow them to copy whatever they want from your site. And no one can actually opt-out because Google is a monopoly in search. So they get away with it, stealing pageviews from content creators.

Most sites are very happy to have traffic from Google. Those that aren't can simply configure robots.txt.

And Google seems to be happy that their search engine is accessible by IE users.

They could even just block users of the toolbar if they object to its behavior, since it's identified in the user agent.

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