Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by bbatsell » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:15 PM UTC

I thought this was the most interesting part:

> The day after that, Bing contacted me. They were hosting an event on February 1 to talk about the state of search and wanted to make sure I had the date saved, in case I wanted to come up for it. I said I’d make it. I later learned that the event was being organized by Wadhwa, author of that TechCrunch article. [emphasis mine]

So the supposedly independent author of an article on TechCrunch that kicked off a massive wave of Google criticism is, less than a month later, organizing events specifically for a Google competitor? Boy, that sure seems above-board.

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

#42

Post by mahmud » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:15 PM UTC

executive wrote: post #34

Google scrapes websites to determine search results. Bing scrapes websites (Google) to determine search results. What's the problem?

If you think crawling is all there is to search engines, I have wget^H^H^H^H a search engine infrastructure to sell you.

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

#43

Post by 51Cards » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:16 PM UTC

executive wrote: post #34

Google scrapes websites to determine search results. Bing scrapes websites (Google) to determine search results. What's the problem?

Look at it like a math problem... Google takes all numbers and figures out the answer itself. Bing writes down the answer from Google's paper. They are hardly the same. Your comment is somewhat like saying "Hey, we're all writing down numbers"

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

#44

Post by tptacek » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:17 PM UTC

ghurlman wrote: post #37

tptacek wrote: post #6

"Is it illegal? Is it cheating? Is it unfair?" Who cares? Google already got everything it needed out of this situation: a gigantic PR win, and a morale boost for their own team. Well played.

I'm not sure how gigantic that PR win is, if I had to come to HN to hear about it.

Give it a day to percolate and then we'll see if I'm wrong. I obviously might be.

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

#45

Post by bad_user » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:17 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #12

zyb09 wrote: post #5

> It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer. Wow, it almost seems that is exactly what they are doing, which is some pretty dirty stuff. Now MS always had a shady track record, but I thought recently the company got a lot better.

You're crazy if you think every player in this space won't opt into "shady" if it means a better user experience. This is just a "shady" we get to hear about.

Like companies give a crap about "user experience" unless that means earning more and more money.

Piggybacking like this should really be copyright infringement or something, as there's nothing morally right about it.

On the other hand Google should be more quite about this, after all they've built their businesses database for Google Maps / Google Places by piggybacking third-party services like Yelp and TripAdvisor. And now all of a sudden when I'm searching for "restaurants" I have to scroll the page to get past Google's own crap.

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

#46

Post by almost » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:20 PM UTC

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…

The allegation is that Bing is/was copying results for long-tail queries. The specific example being some very misspelled words. So in no way is the claim made that Google and Bing results are identical (even for most of those long tail results, given that it's only the top ranking pages).

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

#47

Post by kenjackson » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:21 PM UTC

frb wrote: post #11

Doesn't this make Bing practically useless? I mean I go to an alternative search engine to get alternative search results...

I suspect that this isn't the only way they determine search results :-)

My guess is that they have a relevency metric from their own algorithm, but some results return poor relevency results -- then they may go to this set of secondary results and say, "Are there any results for this query that a higher percentage than expected users clicked on" and then add those results to the list.

IOW, this data probably isn't the common case.

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

#48

Post by sjs382 » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:22 PM UTC

No surprise, as both DDG and Blekko disclose that they use Bing for long-tail queries, but it works at both of those engines, too:

  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag
  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mbzrxpgjys
  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=indoswiftjobinproduction

  http://blekko.com/ws/hiybbprqag
  http://blekko.com/ws/mbzrxpgjys
  http://blekko.com/ws/indoswiftjobinproduction

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

#49

Post by ig1 » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

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…

As it happens there's an exact historical precedent for this. Post code long/lat data is copyrighted in the UK, but users were using Google Maps (and others) to do conversion and supply them to open source databases, the end result is that Google had to change their licensing/API to restrict this sort of behaviour.

Just because you're copying the data indirectly through a third party doesn't mean you're not breaching the copyright.

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

#50

Post by Matt_Cutts » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 3:29 PM UTC

I had a front row seat for this test. I believe the experiment we ran provides conclusive proof. I'm on a panel with a representative from Bing later today and I'll ask Bing about this directly.