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"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 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.
[edit] I have always suspected that the real value of Bing for Microsoft is to prevent Google's data mining of queries originating in Redmond.
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…
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.
In other words, there's a relationship between Page A and Page B if there exists a link beween them (==PageRank). But the strength of the relationship is increased based on how many users click on that link. I think that's the information Bing were trying to capture (or if they weren't, they should have been).
What I'm saying is that it's probably an unintentional side-effect. At scale though, the effect is that Bing gradually uses Google as a signal, simply because Google is a popular site.
edit: Yet another way of saying it: I think it's not just clicks on Google searches that are captured by Bing, but clicks anywhere. Google is a large site, so its influence on Bing can be measured. This is what we're seeing. My theory. I don't work in search.
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…
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.
Given that Google appears to have an active program to monitor the results of search queries on Bing and to track Bing's page rankings and the ways in which they change over time in (How else is this more likely to have come to their attention?), they should hardly be shocked, shocked to find Microsoft doing something similar. [edit] I have always suspected that the real value of Bing for Microsoft is to prevent Goog…
If I'm in the business of giving horse racing tips and I read your tips to see what your strike rate is compared to mine, that's one thing. If I start tipping the same horses as you, purely because you tipped them, that's quite another thing.
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…
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…