Hacker News Reader

Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

Now that we have confirmation that Bing uses clickstream data on sites that they do not control, I'm surprised that no one mentioned this makes them sensitive to click-fraud.

Copying a leader isn’t as objectionable as denying it and I would argue that Google could split their search engine into independent entities—say: crawling, algorithm, interface. That way, competitors could try to outrun them and innovate on one or the other, separately: Firefox, Siri and many others on the interface; Cloudera or Amazon on the crawl, DuckDuckGo and physics labs on the algorithm (just spitballing there). What Bing did wasn’t that different from a grease-monkey script that would supplement bing.com results with Google‘s, it seems — or at least, they could have had the humility to present it that way.

Now, their pride made them confess to being easily gamed.

View on HN

Do we have any information about whether Google uses clickstream data from users traveling between non-Google sites?

As I noted in a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166256), Googler Amit Singhal's wording was a bit vague about whether URL trail data from things like the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Ads, or other systems ever affects rankings. (His careful wording, "put any results on Google’s results page", could mean merely that URL trail data never adds results to the set of all possible results. It could still affect rankings of pages found through other crawling.)

The use of such data is clearly allowed by Google's very broad privacy policy. I would love a clear answer from Google on this. It should be easy to give.

this has been answered many times already - check the other threads.

If so, please link to a definitive statement addressing this from a Googler. I've been looking and haven't found it.

http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/32568287384571904

Interesting, thanks, but doesn't address my question. To be clear, I'm wondering: are clicktrails from Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, Ad programs, or other sources (beyond just Google Search outclicks) ever used to help calculate search rankings?

Robots.txt-sensitive crawling is irrelevant to this question, and whether their toolbar tracks clicks from other search engine result pages is only tangentially relevant, as one small example of the general idea.

And I'm not asking if they've ever done exactly the click inference Bing has done. Rather, I wonder if they're doing vaguely analogous indirect mining of revealed web user preferences via clicktrails. For example, noticing which sites were visited together or in certain order even without crawler-visible links between them. Or noticing which pages were viewed for the longest/shortest times. Or which pages seemed to 'end' a purposeful session. Or other deep-science stuff I can't even imagine.

I don't want them to reveal any proprietary secrets – just whether they have ever used (or would consider it legitimate to use) all the clicktrail data from all their many non-search tools to help with search quality.

Because I've long assumed that they do, and would be surprised if they didn't.

> Now that we have confirmation that Bing uses clickstream data on sites that they do not control, I'm surprised that no one mentioned this makes them sensitive to click-fraud.

I would expect that they know this. The question is how susceptible does it make them? The clickstream is just one of something like a thousand factors that go into the ranking. Perhaps on any real page, it would take more fake clicks than a fraudster can generate to make a worthwhile difference.

Keep in mind that Google was experimenting with pages for which Bing had no information other than the clickstream, so the clickstream made a big difference there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com