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Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

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Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#21

Post by robryan »

wccrawford wrote: post #14

It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test! In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular. Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to mat…

Kind of indicative of where the internet is heading these days, a few big platform players which everyone else is piggybacking on. Like Windows Live Messenger attempting to stay relevant by combining facebook chat with it's own network.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#22

Post by powrtoch »

wccrawford wrote: post #14

It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test! In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular. Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to mat…

That sounds all well and good, but in terms of cost vs. benefit, it's way easier to make a good application by stealing the years of hard work of the industry leaders than it is to reinvent everything and try to come up with your own clever tweaks to improve it. If you could do it without getting caught, it would practically be a no-brainer.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#23

Post by seanalltogether »

krosaen wrote: post #19
raganwald wrote: post #15

Hmmm. Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. But what Bing does is when you use its toolbar, it watches what you do and uses that information to rank results. Is that really copying? It showed Google's Honeypot page because Google's engineers were clicking on the Honeypot page with the toolbar installed. That isn't copying Google's resul…

but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?

Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#24

Post by landhar »

silverbax88 wrote: post #8

I'm not sure about this. It almost sounds like Google is posturing. The reason I say this is that while Google was getting bombed up until last week with scraper sites, Bing wasn't. If Bing was really copying results, they would have reflected the spam sites, because people click on those when they are highly ranked just as often as they click on the originator site. After all, the problem is that the content is iden…

Well, the article suggests that there is more to it than just mere copying. The way I see it, Bing is basically taking a look at what is that the user does when it searches for a term that is unknown to Bing. Once they have this initial data, they are able to filter it as they see fit to avoid getting spam results.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#25

Post by gyardley »

Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no?

Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#26

Post by danpker »

seanalltogether wrote: post #23
krosaen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?

Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.

But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#28

Post by patio11 »

jbeda wrote: post #20
ry0ohki wrote: post #9

Doesn't the Google toolbar do essentially the same thing they are saying IE is doing?

This is addressed in the article. It says that google uses toolbar latency to determine page load latency and that is the only way toolbar data affects page ranking.

It is widely assumed in SEO circles that Google uses toolbar data, among other sources, for finding new URLs to crawl. They're very enthusiastic about getting all pages on the public Internet into the crawl set. User data gets them there faster and more reliably than a hypothetical competing crawler using only e.g. the observed link graph.

Edit: I did some digging to see if I could find an authoritative source on this, and found that Matt Cutts specifically denies this particular usage of user data for expanding the crawl set on his blog. Mea maxima culpa.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/

Edit the second: An amusing note on this general subject: Google will fuzz test certain search forms on, e.g., high value government websites to get at the juicy data behind them which would not otherwise be reachable from just traversing the link graph.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#29

Post by random42 »

gyardley wrote: post #25

Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no? Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.

You are misunderstanding the word, 'Copy'. Here, it does not mean like "3-D movies is a great idea, lets copy it from avatar". Its more on the lines on "This code is great, lets copy it".

Copy == getting inspired by brilliance of an idea and implement on your own in the first case.

Copy == stealing in the latter case.

Copying (Ctrl C+ Ctrl V), google search results is theft, not "getting inspired" from previous body of works.

Edit - Made the PoV clearer.

Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

#30

Post by patio11 »

danpker wrote: post #26
seanalltogether wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.

But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue

Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc.

(Given Google's near-monopoly of the market, Microsoft and DDG have some amusing competitive synergy going on, don't they. DDG can criticize Google all they please for retaining user data because DDG doesn't and isn't in a position to benefit from it. Microsoft, which certainly is in a position to benefit from it, doesn't need to worry about Google calling them on it because Google is the only search engine that can actually lose market share over the issue.)

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