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Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

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Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#12

"We do not copy Google's results." Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown. This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. Bu…

It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's". The nuances you detail are buried halfway through Danny Sullivan's article and are not reflected in his takeaway in the conclusion.

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#13
post #6

Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.

How do you know that they target search sites? This could also be a more generic approach: If there's a link from page A to page B also return page B if someone searches for page A's keywords and there are only few results.

Sure, the question is how you differentiate those actions. Some one typed in [x] and then clicked [y] could certainly be generic, but that would be a massive amount of data to crunch and would require a significant amount of congruency to be enough to modify the Bing algorithm.

How would it differentiate between a form submission and a search? And if it's not and still sending all of that data back to MS, that's far more disconcerting than them just watching me on Google.

It's certainly more believable that the sites were either targeted or were extracted from massive amounts of data for this purpose.

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the original claim? Google did a test with completely nonsense words and 100% unrelated search results with those terms. The results showed up on Bing. Whatever Bing is doing, it is using Google's search data. http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

I didn't deny that they are using Google's data. But it could be possible that they have some kind of generic approach not specifically targeting Google (or even search engines).

Exactly, they could just observe what user clicks after search (on any search engine, including Bing) and use it as a signal.

If that is indeed the case, then they are not copying results from Google, they are just tracking users' choices to improve position of interesting results on Bing. Personally, I don't see anything wrong about that.

Keep in mind that in Google's experiment, they always clicked on the first result, which is probably why their result was send to Microsoft and that the experiment "succeeded".

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#16
The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#17

Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.

Don't Chrome and the Google Toolbar also track clickstream data to refine search results? I assumed that's what they were asking my permission to phone home with, to 'improve their services'.

Do they gentlemanly ignore clickstreams on competitor web sites?

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#18
post #16

The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

Why would potential employees take this negatively? This is exactly the type of thing I'd love to work on. Give me opt-in to your web browsing characteristics, and let me optimize your searches. Opt-in is the key.

I'm certainly an odd one here, but I'm more inclined to use the Bing toolbar due to this, although the perf cost is still too high to use any toolbar, IMO.

What would be nice is if the browsers had an open format of your browsing history that you can send to providers of your choice...

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#19
post #16

The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

#20
post #16

The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

[deleted]
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