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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

#171

Post by contextfree »

alain94040 wrote: post #164
haberman wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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

... in 7-9% of cases.

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

#172

Post by lhorie »

A few quick thoughts:

- generally speaking, the conclusion seems to be that for regular queries, Bing uses mostly other clues to figure out relevance, so this is basically a storm in a cup of water. Regardless, since both Google's and Bing's algos are closed-source, we're going on faith when either company says data gathered from one of their products doesn't affect search quality.

- the whole thing about making a ranking overrider and talking about it publicly seems like a stupid move. Why in the world would you say you developed such code and then "deleted it" in an all-code-is-version-controlled-these-days world? This won't go very well against the claims that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services (e.g. email, maps) vs competitors.

- The experiment reportedly was triggered because Bing results were getting better for misspelled searches. But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science...

- if Google feels that its SERPs are the most relevant possible, shouldn't it make sense that competitors trying to improve relevance will inevitably end up showing the same results as Google on at least a subset of queries?

- if you're saying Bing has just as good results as Google, regardless of the means to the goal, then how does publicizing that help the whole "Google's overrun by spam" meme going on?

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

#173

Post by yaix »

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

You're totally right, nice find.

Just happy that my current SE favourite does not seem to copy and to actually have their very own results: http://entireweb.com/#q=hiybbprqag

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

#175

Post by bluelu »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #50

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.

You are just jealous that your engineers haven't thought of this yourself.

I bet is just recording general searches (input query) + clicked links. A pretty good idea.

And don't tell me you are not using the results from the google toolbar to rank the sites in google search.

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

#176

Post by yaix »

sjs382 wrote: post #111
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't be in DDG. That's one of the pieces of intelligence we try to add on top. We try to not "correct" your query. Here's another example of a real search my wife did the other day that illustrates this point on both Google & Bing: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal

I love that you don't try to correct queries. I hate when Google auto-corrects my query and I need to click another link to get to my actual query. Thanks for that!

Or you just "quote" your original misspelled query and Google will search for the misspelled version without any additional click.

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

#177

Post by neild »

pbz wrote: post #144
stanleydrew wrote: post #135

Earlier 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…

Is this malicious site detection by any chance, or does that use a different mechanism?

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

#178

Post by alecco »

sjs382 wrote: post #111
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't be in DDG. That's one of the pieces of intelligence we try to add on top. We try to not "correct" your query. Here's another example of a real search my wife did the other day that illustrates this point on both Google & Bing: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal

I love that you don't try to correct queries. I hate when Google auto-corrects my query and I need to click another link to get to my actual query. Thanks for that!

But in this case DDG does give Google's auto-corrected (without even telling you!) and I bet it happens to many terms as it is mostly a proxy/filter of Bing.

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

#179

Post by contextfree »

While the "cheating" angle on this seems hugely overblown, I do think that companies that harvest data through toolbars etc. should be obligated to explain upfront in clear language how they use the data. Not bury it in the legalese of a vast impenetrable ToS.

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

#180

Post by firebones »

user24 wrote: post #84
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #50

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.

I have a suspicion what you'll find is that Bing use the toolbar to match $current_page_content with $clicked_page_content. When $current_page_content contains obscure words, that becomes the only signal, and so bing's engine will naturally associate it with $clicked_page. 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 relation…

Exactly. If they are just matching (even more simply) $search_term_entered to $clicked_link then you would expect that they are "copying" from any search engine configured in the toolbar.

Now the interesting thing to reverse engineer is what other information might be passed along to give relevance to the search term/click pair. If Google could establish that there was a third piece of info in the tuple, such as "originating search domain" and that Bing used this to weight term/click pairs based on the authority of the source, Google's claims would hold more water. I suspect that Bing has to apply some kind of validation of the term/click pairs (for instance, only sending pairs that appear on the same results page from accredited engines), otherwise they would be subject to "Bing bomb" attacks where users or botnets vote up lower ranked (or even unranked) clicks for a given term. (And if they don't validate or detect gaming, then there would be ample opportunity to inject all kinds of synthetic behavior into Bing's search results. Based on the relatively few number of users and clicks it took to own a long tail term, it seems like the protection they have is very weak or simple.)

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