The funny thing is that people with the Bing Toolbar are still using Google to do web searches.
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
141–150 of 288 posts
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#142I 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.
It's embarrassing for Google to complain about this. You FINALLY get a little competition on your turf and you try to make some big issue that, as a market leader, the product you produce is being watched, analyzed and in some ways incorporated by your competitor. There is no victim here. They are not taking your 1st result and copying it. They are taking the result the user clicked. Obviously you didn't predict that…
As we all know, this isn't the first time Microsoft has copied someone else. And I'm sure it won't be the last.
I think Google has a right to complain. Microsoft has resorted to these less than innovative tactics to monopolize themselves for a long time now, and it isn't fair to companies like Google who have worked their butts off (and gave 1.8 million shares - $336M in 2005 - to Stanford for the PageRank algorithm) to develop their superior product.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#143I 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.
It's embarrassing for Google to complain about this. You FINALLY get a little competition on your turf and you try to make some big issue that, as a market leader, the product you produce is being watched, analyzed and in some ways incorporated by your competitor. There is no victim here. They are not taking your 1st result and copying it. They are taking the result the user clicked. Obviously you didn't predict that…
Just because you are big, doesn't prohibit you from exposing issues.
We really don't know how much value Bing puts on clicks made on Google. Perhaps a lot?
What's the Google's official stand on this?
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not say "similar data" because "similar" is a bit too slippery a word in a technical context. There's too much plausible deniablity. What I am asking is if Google's tools send data back to Googleplex to be mined for the sake of search engine improvements.
Then what use is the word "similarly" in your comment? Similarly send? As in via HTTP requests? I think that's either obvious or irrelevant or both. 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…
Quote from the article: "In fact, Google stressed that the only information that flows back at all from Chrome is what people are searching for from within the browser, if they are using Google as their search engine."
I'm pretty positive that's not true. If you run Fiddler when browsing with Chrome you will see constant hits to toolbarqueries.clients.google.com whether you're using Google or not. I could be browsing some MS site and toolbarqueries.clients.google.com gets hit. Chromium doesn't do this.
Edit: You can uncheck everything under privacy and it will still send those requests.
Edit2: What it sends back looks something like this:
Looks like auto-fill data, but this happens when I click around a site, NOT when searching Google or typing something in the address bar. For some sites (interestingly, not all) it sends 3 requests for each page load.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#145Google wasting time embarrassing Bing? I think this is more interesting that learning what Bing are doing.
Google are clearly monitoring Bing (and others) as a matter of course. I'm interested to know what they'd have done if they'd found Bing providing better quality results. Would they have spent resources trying to figure out what Bing were doing right, or would that be "copying" too?
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#146Earlier 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…
> 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…
I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it there is some precedent in the US of intentionally ignoring robots.txt being unauthorized computer access, exposing you to all the liability that entails (possibly criminal).
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes a lot of sense, and would have be easy enough for Google to test as well, creating some tiny, brand new, never before heard of test search engine that Bing would have no reason to copy, see if the same thing happened.
That would be a nice way of testing it. edit: I'm not even sure if it's only search engines that are being analysed by Bing or all pages, but it's possible that it is just SEs - they could be capturing query terms distinctly.
They also probably should have tested to see if it happened with results other than the ones in the #1 spot.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read the article and other comments here it's been made perfectly clear that the Google toolbar and Chrome browser are not sending similar data back to Google.
Ah, at least the google toolbar does. If you enable PageRank on the Google Toolbar it sends back all the urls you visit just like the bing toolbar. From the toolbar privacy policy: "Toolbar's enhanced features, such as PageRank and Sidewiki, operate by sending Google the addresses and other information about sites at the time you visit them." Google has managed to demonstrate one way MS appears to be using the data.…
Yes absolutely. I don't think anyone in this thread or in the article denied that the Google Toolbar sends data to Google. And you are absolutely right that Google's use of the data collected should be clearly stated in a privacy policy and EULA. It might be, I haven't read them.
But the article clearly covers the available public statements on this issue and patio11 dug up a post from Matt Cutts in his comment below that directly addresses this: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#149> 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.
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Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then what use is the word "similarly" in your comment? Similarly send? As in via HTTP requests? I think that's either obvious or irrelevant or both. 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…
Quote from the article: "In fact, Google stressed that the only information that flows back at all from Chrome is what people are searching for from within the browser, if they are using Google as their search engine." I'm pretty positive that's not true. If you run Fiddler when browsing with Chrome you will see constant hits to toolbarqueries.clients.google.com whether you're using Google or not. I could be browsing…
That's troubling. I'd be very interested in seeing a response from Google about this. Are you aware of any? Also, can you use Fiddler to inspect the content of the requests? I'm not familiar with the tool.