Hacker News Reader

2011

https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google

Apparently, the copying allegation is false. There's more to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24112418

Not excusing MS, but it seems they were not wholesale copying Google results.

"Scraping" was the wrong word. I was remembering incorrectly. Microsoft did not have to scrape. They were apparently using search data captured through Internet Explorer. There was a time before Google had control of the browser. This illustrates how companies with browsers can gather data about users' web activity and how far they can go. Today, even Firefox is gathering data about users' activity with "telemetry", and users typing things into the browser's search box are by default sending this data to Google.

> users typing things into the browser's search box are by default sending this data to Google.

This is incorrect. Firefox will prompt you whether to enable search suggestions on first use, and will not fetch suggestions until you say yes.

Interesting that you said "until" instead of "unless".

Aha. Malware scraping!

Not GP but from memory this was the same incident: https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/