Looks like Microsoft is "innovating" again...
A great deal of value has been added to this conversation by this comment going by the upvotes.
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
261–270 of 288 posts
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all the money, resources and engineering talent that Microsoft has, you'd think they wouldn't need to do this, though. That's what's baffling to me. Call Google the market leader all you want, but let's not forget that Microsoft's market cap is around 40 billion dollars greater than Google's. That's more than Research in Motion's total value!
all search engines make use of a variety of signals. Bing decided to use what users click on as a signal. Google spotted it and thought it was 'zomg bing are stealing our results'. I don't understand why you think taking advantage of a new signal to improve search is not a smart move by Bing?
The googlers are just angry that they couldn't come up with that genious idea themselves.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc. (Given Google's near-monopoly of the market, Microsoft and DDG have some amusing competitive synergy going on, don't they. DDG can criticize Google all they please for retaining user data because DDG doesn't and isn't in a position to benefit from it. Mi…
For all Google’s sins, there is a Dashboard that let you erase all you care them not to know: Google could promote that heavily in case of stone, glass house. I always assumed this would be a great way to learn more about queries: spotting what words people are ashamed to have searched for. It could be something a registered user could set from a browser toggle, and DuckDuckGo is a very good project, or course. My po…
While it's great that Google lets you delete information, harvest-your-data-by-default is not a choice made with your best interests at heart.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#264Did anyone stop to think that Bing is leveraging IE to improve/influence search results regardless of the URLs this monitored traffic is gleaned from?
Google states 9 of 100 planted queries showed up on Bing. You think Amazon, Godaddy, and AOL could make similar claims?
Probably...but those examples aren't worried about their market share evaporating.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#265Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no? Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.
You are misunderstanding the word, 'Copy'. Here, it does not mean like "3-D movies is a great idea, lets copy it from avatar" . Its more on the lines on "This code is great, lets copy it" . Copy == getting inspired by brilliance of an idea and implement on your own in the first case. Copy == stealing in the latter case. Copying (Ctrl C+ Ctrl V), google search results is theft, not "getting inspired" from previous bod…
Or:
"3-d movies are a great idea, lets take scenes from Avatar and put them in our movie" I don't think excessive simplification lends justice to the issue. Just like how piracy isn't necessarily theft, what Bing is doing isn't necessarily copying.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
You clearly didn't read the whole article. If you did, you clearly didn't understand the article. Step back a little bit, fanboy. Microsoft wasn't copying anyone here.
Oh I definitely did read it in its entirety and understood it perfectly. What you're failing to do is see the whole picture. Let's put it this way... if Google hadn't bought the PageRank algorithm from Stanford and put years of work into perfecting their search results, Microsoft wouldn't have any way to track which Google search results users click. It's an unfair tactic that clearly demonstrates Microsoft's sketchi…
All your comments are coming from your assumption that Microsoft is trying to monopolize in something - in this case, search. Hence, your comments (although you will disagree) are biased and irrational. Microsoft isn't trying to monopolize in anything nowadays. In fact, they can't, so they aren't even trying.
From a search engine user's point of view, I believe this whole fiasco is ridiculous. First, it's ridiculous because Google is handling this situation very immaturely. Matt Cutts should not have confronted the VP of Bing in a way he did. Second, if I were the user of the Bing Toolbar, I gave permission to the Bing Toolbar to use my behaviors to polish my search results. I have no problem with that. Lastly, the experiments they did has more to do with "guessing what user wanted" than "what PageRank does".
I've used Bing fairly often past 6 months because of too many spams Google search results were giving back. Now that Google has fixed (or still working on) the spam problem, I'm starting to use Google again. However, what I noticed from the past 6 months is that Google search isn't so much better than Bing. This Bing Toolbar fiasco only applies to synthetic queries that I would never make.
Is Bing cheating? I don't think so. To me, they are just using another signal from user's permission. However, the definition of cheating will be different for everyone else.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#267A 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 ra…
But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science...
Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science. The generation between keyword and website content/results is what a search engine is all about, and what Google does (arguably) well.
I believe why Google is crying foul is because it is the only reference to generate the mapping between the keywords they made up and the website results. Bing did not have these mappings until they evaluated user clickthroughs that went through Google's results, with their browsing history going something like : 1/ http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword 2/ http://website.com
Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keywordhttp://website.com ; this is the shady part: if google did not generate its results, that mapping would never have taken place: the user would never have been able to tell Bing that there is relevance between the two unless Google existed.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#268Instead of whining, I would have gone on the offensive.
So we have a competitor copying our search results. Great. Now how can we fuck with that?
Figure out the requests coming from microsoft and return a different set of search results (e.g. XXX stuff) so that it doesn't show up for organic google resutls. Set the trap and once bing has incorporated those results for a keyterm, spam TC and LOL at Steve Ballmer gettingn worked up.
This discredits the relevancy of bing and all that PR dollars spent rebranding would have gone down the drain. Imagine searching for a harmless search term like 'poodle' and getting hardcore triple xxx results.
Oh well, dont do evil right?
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. I'd question even that hyperbolic interpretation. Let's say that Google sets up a script that sends queries to websites and then record the results and incorporates what links are shown on that site into their search rankings. Is that clearly copying? No, that's just pagerank. If you have a web dire…
> No, that's just pagerank. This is my first thought as well. Google's pagerank analyzes the link structure of the web as one of the inputs to its search ranking. Apparently, Bing's toolbar analyzes page content coupled with user click behavior as one of the inputs to its search ranking. These two things don't seem very different to me. Both of them are relying heavily on the value provided to them by tracking and an…
I have the same thought. It is more a matter of framing. A while ago some people accuse Google of unethically profiting because they are farming the link structure of the Internet, which is the labor of many people (is it Nicholas Carr?) I don't really buy this framing. But Google's accusation seems fall on a similar line of argument. You can also setup a "Google sting" to prove they are copying from the Internet. It is called "Google Bombing".
Bing will be at fault if they specifically target Google. But if you consider entering a keyword and then click a link is essentially targeting Google search, then it only expose another problem, that is Google's monopoly on the search market.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are browser toolbars that aren't spyware? I'd think anyone likely to actually hear about this would have already been assuming that all browser toolbars are spyware.
It might be a good exercise to chase down old posts of people who wrote the first browser toolbars, as well as the browser infrastructure that made them possible. We can contrast the speculation on why they might have been a good idea with the actual result. Not as a way to trash them, but as an exercise in how smart people can miss the mark.
More popular if done as a way to trash them, I expect. You could make "trash old usenet posts".com and have a ranking system for "worst decisions ever".
(C.A.R Hoare's billion dollar mistake, for example).