Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

But the article definitely gets a few things wrong. For example, having worked at Bing I can tell you this: in general "obvious" misspellings are autocorrected without comment. It's not some sort of magical copying procedure, it's actually a policy. Want proof? Here's an example query you can repeat: http://fayr.am/4KdG (direct query link: http://fayr.am/4JZD)

But otherwise, shit yes everyone is scrutinizing google trying to figure out what they're doing. That doesn't mean other players aren't doing their own optimizations, or even running relevancy metrics against other search engines. Relevancy is not a concept with fixed metrics, and every player in the search market does everything they can to figure out what their competitor is doing.

And even the raw results leakage is fairly par for the course. It's not like Bing searches are a crawl of google searches; Microsoft gets this data from browsers running this toolbar and uses it to help shore up queries where they don't return good results.

Again, if you actually read the article, you will come across the section titled "What About The Google Toolbar & Chrome?" I encourage you to read it.

[edit] Also, see this comment and patio11's subcomment further down the page, both of which were written an hour before yours: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469#score_2165578.

I see this Microsoft tactic as similar. They're considering search terms that resulted in a visit to the page from other search engines as being important indicators of the page content. If they have that URL-to-URL-trail data legally, and the signal works well, and they are not singling out Google's URLs as the only source of such a signal, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Google didn't get where they are by throwing out legally-collected useful data, and Bing won't catch up to a leader who has clicktrail sensors everywhere, via analytics/toolbar/ads/mobile/etc., by throwing away legally-collected useful data.

Absolutely not. The PageRank feature sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page. We do not do that, and we will not do that.

Put any results could be read narrowly as "this data isn't used to add pages to the index", or more generally as "this data isn't used to rank results relative to each other". Also, Singhal's pledge that "we will not do that" is much stronger than any statement I've ever seen in any Google privacy policy, which all pretty much say Google may use any info they have to improve their services.

Matt Cutts, can you clarify if Singhal in fact meant the 'narrow' or 'general' interpretation above?

And, if the 'general' meaning, then is there any statement about the use of clicktrail data in Google's published privacy policies that is as strong as Singhal's?