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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand this.

* Are Microsoft saying end users are naturally clicking on nonsense phrases invented by Google?

* If not, what are they saying?

What's not to understand? Microsoft is colecting search phrases from searches people make though the IE search box. Then they are tying that data to the next page people click to after the search. Google intentionally polluted their data using odd phrases and asked users to click on their bogus results. Given that the only data bing would have for those strange phrases is polluted crap from Googlers it's not surprising that their engine that's using user supplied data would attempt to return the only match it can find.

Since nailer's comment on my other post can't be directly replied to.

From googles mouth

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results"

In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.

What may be misleading about Google's statement is that it paints the picture of engineers hunched over laptops patiently typing in nonsense queries a keystroke at a time.

I guess I just have trouble seeing it taking more than about 3 minutes before 20 of the top industry engineers figured out a way to automate the process. Which is pretty long compared to the 2 seconds it would take for them to start thinking of ways to improve the SEO.

It's the human factor in Google's "experiment" that just doesn't fit. If they wanted a controlled approach, they would have written an application and run it and logged everything. Instead, it appears that they provided laptops so that the engineers could experiment and innovate their way to exploiting the Bing toolbar.

> In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.

Thanks - that's what I've been getting at. This isn't data entry into the Bing toolbar, it's into a non-Bing page when one has the toolbar installed.

> What's not to understand? Microsoft is colecting search phrases from searches people make though the IE search box.

This is not correct. From Google:

"We asked these engineers to enter the queries into the search box on the Google home page"

Google did not enter the data into the IE search box.

Edit: I see you replied to yourself acknowledging the mistake - please ignore this then!

> Google asked users to click on their bogus results.

Got a citation for that?

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

Engineers are generally not considered end users.

The test wasn't natural. A number of Google people did click on the links artificially associated with the nonsense phrases, while they had Bing's toolbar active.

If the Bing toolbar is picking up on this sort of thing generically (i.e. picking keywords out of the query-string on any page and associating them with clicked links, though I'm not sure how it could with a useful degree of accuracy in a way that couldn't be "maliciously" gamed buy underhand SEO activities) then I see nothing wrong in it as long as the users have knowingly opted in to their activity being analysed in this way. It would just be indexing keywords and content just as a web spider would.

If it is specifically detecting that it is on a Google page, and/or other search competitors, than the issue is much more cloudy.

As it's been pointed out, Bing compares more than just the clickstream datapoints. You have to imagine they provide some PageRank/domain weighting to the relevance. So if you setup a dummy site with no existing pagerank/weight, and performed the same experiement, you likely would not see the same results. However, since you can imagine Google is heavily weighted, those data point score high and can rapidly reflect in Bing search results.

But it only worked 7% of the time despite 20 Google engineers' best efforts, the honeypots being ranked number 1, and the data repeatedly sent to Bing.

The Google engineers who planted the phrases were running the Bing toolbar themselves. That part isn't in question.

So MS are saying Google themselves uploaded the data to MS by using Bing toolbar?

Does Google agree their engineers did this?

Yes. From the original article yesterday:

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.

No. There's a difference between having the toolbar installed but typing something into the google.com directly (which actually occurred) and typing something into the Bing toolbar.

Even if you exclusively use Google's web interface to search, the Bing toolbar gathers anonymous data about your browsing (if you've got that option enabled). It's fairly clear about that when you install it. To my knowledge, all of these search engine toolbars gather statistics on a broader scale than specifically what's typed into their search fields, Google's included.

Dude, I've seen your comments on this thread. Several of them are basically asking people to confirm facts everybody agrees on. You should come better prepared for the next discussion.

Sorry to be an ass. But you're wasting my time on this site, since I have to wade through your questions to get to the interesting ones.

There's something most of HN are missing. You are indeed being rude by not letting me point it out:

* Google having the Bing toolbar installed and entering the search into Bing toolbar is one thing (and I'd expect MS to be using the data)

* Google having the Bing tolbar installed and entering the search into the Google hom page is a very different thing (and I'd expect MS to be using the data)

Judging from the moderation in this thread, people seem to think the first happened.

According to Google, it did not. No other source contravenes this.

Sorry if you think me pointing this out is bad. Perhaps your efforts would be better reporting all the non-hacker stories on the front page?

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