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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

#71

Post by Matt_Cutts »

sjs382 wrote: post #48

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

Ouch, you're totally right. So you're saying that because Blekko and DDG are powered partly by Bing, the rankings on all three engines are showing the results that Google inserted?

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

#72

Post by ig1 »

bbatsell wrote: post #41

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…

Matt Cutts from Google and Rich Skrenta from Blekko are also speaking at that event (not to mention Peter Thiel, Esther Dyson, and Malcolm Gladwell). It's an industry event that happens to be sponsored by Bing, it's not really an MS event though.

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

#73

Post by dansingerman »

My take is this: the whole Google ethos is that they are trying to have the best algorithm to give the best results. Outside of this sting they have always been at pains to put forward the view that nothing is manually ranked.

I think the same thing applies to Bing here: if they have a generic algorithm that ranks results based on toolbar (or other data) it could be easy to see how their data is skewed by Google given the amount of traffic Google search gets compared to the rest of the internets. This seems fine to me.

But if their algorithm does stuff with activity on google.com because it is google.com then this is a pretty clear foul - it is both essentially copying, and the equivalent of manually ranking results (specifically, Google results)

The corollary of this is that if their algorithm is generic, then it will still work if Google were to cease to exist. If it's not generic, it would be useless without Google.

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

#74

Post by illdave »

poacher69 wrote: post #70
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can test that Microsoft's software sends the clicks back to Microsoft, although I believe Microsoft sends the data back by SSL, so it's harder to verify even that than you'd expect. Google's search results are blocked in robots.txt, so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly. All the evidence points to users' clicks on Google, which are then sent to Microsoft. Microsoft has (so…

are you claiming that google never scrapes bing search results pages? or any other search result pages?

From my experience, Googlebot doesn't crawl pages that are blocked in robots.txt files. Check out Bing's robots.txt: http://bing.com/robots.txt - notice how /search is disallowed. That typically means that Googlebot isn't able to access that page. The same for the other search engines, it's more down to if they specify (through robots.txt) that Googlebot isn't allowed to crawl those results.

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

#75

Post by tygorius »

kenjackson wrote: post #40
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…

Isn't this just the McDonald's v Subway/Burger King example? McDonald's has the research and foot traffic. Rather than do your own, watch where the successful McDonald's go and then put your restaurant across the street. If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on yo…

Indeed. Drucker somewhere makes the point that a business's key activities are innovation and marketing -- which implies you don't necessarily have to be innovative in your marketing, just good at it. Hmmm... I was just thinking that rather than do my own exhaustive search for startup companies to invest in, I'll just check who has gotten support from Y Combinator and offer them a deal, piggybacking off of Paul Graham's work. Wait, it's been done? Oh, never mind.

As a practical matter, I doubt customers will care so long as they've always had the option of turning off that part of IE's behavior. I mean, when did you last care about the authenticity of your phone directory's information?

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

#76

Post by Matt_Cutts »

poacher69 wrote: post #70
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can test that Microsoft's software sends the clicks back to Microsoft, although I believe Microsoft sends the data back by SSL, so it's harder to verify even that than you'd expect. Google's search results are blocked in robots.txt, so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly. All the evidence points to users' clicks on Google, which are then sent to Microsoft. Microsoft has (so…

are you claiming that google never scrapes bing search results pages? or any other search result pages?

poacher69, we crawl the public web. Anyone that blocks us out with robots.txt, we won't crawl. If you check bing.com/robots.txt, it has "Disallow: /search" . So no, we won't crawl Bing's search results pages. If anything, users tend to complain when search results from Lycos or wherever show up in Google.

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

#77

Post by illdave »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #68
kgermino wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep us posted as best you can.

I believe the search panel with Google and Bing will be live-streaming, so anyone can tune in. It's by a group called Big Think.

Clickable: http://bigthink.com/series/62

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

#79

Post by samwise »

samwise wrote: post #69

The real question should be why is Google not doing this. Bing seems to be learning from what results users choose and improving their results. Seems like a no brainer, unless i missed something. I also really like this for some reason. It's very ... gangster. Shows that bing is scrappy and willing to bend the rules. That being said, i will still continue using Google.

not sure why i'm being downvoted. if you don't agree leave a reply.

it's very discouraging

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

#80

Post by kgrin »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #66
raganwald wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article suggests that the Bing toolbar monitors what its user click and uses that information to improve Bing search results. Is that what you have conclusively proved? I'm interested in another experiment. If you set up a honeypot, search for the term, but never click on the link, does the honeypot start showing up in Bing? The article doesn't say whether you tried this. Did you try it? Are Bing scraping your re…

Anyone can test that Microsoft's software sends the clicks back to Microsoft, although I believe Microsoft sends the data back by SSL, so it's harder to verify even that than you'd expect. Google's search results are blocked in robots.txt, so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly. All the evidence points to users' clicks on Google, which are then sent to Microsoft. Microsoft has (so…

> so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly

Isn't compliance with robots.txt more of a voluntary thing?

I'm not accusing MS of ignoring it when convenient, but if you/we/someone is accusing them of acting unethically wrt search results in the first place, telling the crawler to ignore robots.txt wouldn't be that far away, would it? (And likewise faking the user-agent, etc.)

For better or for worse, UA identification, robots.txt compliance - all those things are voluntary. I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be, but it certainly makes a difference in terms of whether something's possible or not. (And, if you ask me, places an even higher obligation on the actors to behave ethically, lest trust completely evaporates and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket).

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