Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanos | Hacker News Reader

"The bottom line is that Bing's index contains associations that it could never have figured out if Google hadn't figured them out first."

Actually, it is the users who are figuring out what is relevant not Google since a) Bing are collecting data on the links they click regardless of where Google ranks it (could be on the 20th page of Google search results for all Bing care) and b) Bing are collecting this data from all sites, there has been no evidence that Google search results are treated any differently to any other site.

View on HN

> Actually, it is the users who are figuring out what is relevant not Google

When you do a Google search, Google chooses ten URLs from over 1 trillion that are in its index. Creating this list takes teams of full-time engineers and data-centers full of servers that crawl the internet constantly.

The user spends, on average, less than ten seconds choosing 1 out of those 10 URLs. In a small minority of cases, they'll click to further pages, in which case maybe they were choosing 1 out of 100.

So Google narrowed the search down from 1 trillion URLs to 10, and the user narrowed it down from 10 URLs to 1. And yet you think it's the user who did the hard work?

Individually, it negligible. Cumulatively, the time spent by the many thousands (millions?) of users who are clicking links they deem relevant for queries all over the web (Bing are collecting data from all sites) is huge...

My point is that the assertion that Google are doing all the work in creating the data used by Bing is clearly false.

> My point is that the assertion that Google are doing all the work in creating the data used by Bing is clearly false.

Clearly it's not 100%, but what percentage is it?

The user ends up visiting 1 out 1T possible URLs.

Google narrowed it down from 1T to 10 URLs (11 orders of magnitude).

The user narrowed it down from 10 to 1 URLs (1 order of magnitude).

Even if you measure this logarithmically, Google did 91% of the work, and the user did 9%. And the Microsoft people are arguing that it's totally justified because of that 9%.

Or you could measure it linearly, and argue that Google did 99.999999999% of the work because that's the percentage of the results they eliminated.

Either way, this is an extremely weak justification for taking a result of which 91% came from your direct competitor (when measured in the most charitable way).

those millions of users are all searching on platforms where 99%+ of the work was already done by the site's own engineers. Cmon, this isn't rocket science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com