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

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

#161

Post by tintin » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:52 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…

"The takeaway in't whether Bing copies Google. The takeaway is that Bing's toolbar is spyware" And also that you can control search results in Bing. Nice feature for advertisers.

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

#162

Post by SoftwareMaven » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:53 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #129

user24 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, the "strike rate" is precision/recall. Good advertising CTRs is a side-effect of relevancy. Relevancy is measured by precision and recall. edit to expand: If the measure by which a search engine evaluated itself was advertising revenues, they'd all have massive intrusive adverts, and no users. The only viable measure can be the quality of the search results themselves. As a happy coincidence, if you build somethi…

I believe that Google and Microsoft evaluate their search engines by entirely different measures. Google primarily by advertising revenue, Microsoft primarily measures by preventing searches using Google. Sure the ad money is nice for Microsoft, but they don't need it for their business to be profitable and they would be doing major research into search anyway because of its importance to businesses - they sell datab…

Which may explain why Google is very successful and Microsoft is forced to buy its customers (and have huge losses in that division).

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

#163

Post by alttab » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:53 PM UTC

TimothyBurgess wrote: post #142

encoderer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I disagree. From some point of view somewhere this is "standing on the shoulders of giants."

Perspective changes things here, which means no one is "right" or "wrong".

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

#164

Post by alain94040 » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:54 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #153

encoderer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it's beneath Google to complain about Microsoft riding on its coattails for the highly valuable "long tail" of queries, surely it's beneath Microsoft to sue Android manufacturers for competing in the smartphone space? http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8b1ecaa2-cdb2-11df-9c82-00144feab4... Would it have been better if Google had jumped straight to the questionable lawsuit part, like every other company seems to do when thr…

Let me try to understand what happened. For some obscure searches that return no results normally, a handful of users searched on Google using IE's toolbar and then clicked on bogus results.

Those bogus results made it to Bing's results eventually.

Ok... So it proves Microsoft analyzes the toolbar behavior and when it has no other data, it will therefore look like a copy of Google search.

Sounds fair to me. Do you want to get into a discussion on how exactly Google tracks you online?

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

#165

Post by DenisM » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

krosaen wrote: post #19

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…

but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?

If a page contains a unique word, and people who were on that page universally go to a different page, that could be enough evidence for bing to assume there's a link between the unique word and the target page.

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

#166

Post by NonMint » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:57 PM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #43

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"

Think of it this way: Your professor asks you for the name of the imaginary friend that the professor's son always talks about. You have no idea what the answer could possibly be, so in your head you choose "John," a reasonably common name with a very low probability of being right. Google answers with a strong conviction in it's voice that the answer is "Mark," another common name. You have no evidence to believe that your own guess is correct, so in the face of the appearance of belief on Google's behalf, aren't you the least bit tempted to say that it's Mark and not John?

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

#167

Post by contextfree » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 5:58 PM UTC

Buried halfway through the article:

"These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor quality matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. [...] Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100. Google says it doesn’t know why they didn’t all work, [...]"

The writer apparently thinks these results justify concluding the article with this takeaway:

"When Bing launched in 2009, the joke was that Bing stood for either “Because It’s Not Google” or “But It’s Not Google.” Mining Google’s searches makes me wonder if the joke should change to “Bing Is Now Google.”

okayyyy.

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

#168

Post by simonk » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:02 PM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #72

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.

Still, a TechCrunch & BusinessWeek contributor that gets paid by Bing is interesting.

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

#169

Post by recoiledsnake » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:03 PM UTC

TimothyBurgess wrote: post #142

encoderer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Err, by that line of thinking, Google leveraged Linux (the hard work of volunteers) to earn tens of billions and does not release the modified code for use of the volunteers. Of course they are not required to, but it isn't fair to Linux developers who have worked their butts off to develop Linux.

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

#170

Post by ig1 » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:04 PM UTC

forgotusername wrote: post #151

tommi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even Matt's allegation is softened by "I believe" here: there appears to be nothing that conclusively indicates Bing is solely targeting Google. For example, the observed behaviour could be a side-effect of a generic algorithm to extract and associate search queries with a user's click stream, which is only a minor variant of what Google itself does with its own toolbar. If the case described above were true, then al…

Associating search queries and click stream behaviour is fine if it's your own search engine. Doing it for someone else's search engine isn't (regardless of who's doing it).