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

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

#271

Post by Jamiecon » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:33 AM UTC

tintin wrote: post #161

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.

Only for terms that are worthless.

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

#272

Post by magicalist » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:52 AM UTC

othermaciej wrote: post #225

nlogn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Android devices being similar in some ways to the iPhone is even remotely analogous to what Bing is doing here. One is called healthy competition (and I don't see how Android is copying iOS). The other is literally just copying data.

The original Android phone design looked like this: http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/androidphone.jpg Then iPhone came out and it looked like this: http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/... Now Android phones look like this: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2795/4208849005_dd4b608729.jp... You don't see any signs of copying here?

turtles all the way down, my friend: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_YgpHa1oeHME/TTxZAZWLaxI/AAAAAAAAC_...

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

#273

Post by visural » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 2:03 AM UTC

forgotusername wrote: post #197

ig1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

In the hypothetical situation above, it has almost nothing to do with the search engine - it is both the user providing the query and selecting the result: this is the data of value, not which intermediary provided the list of results to select from.

Really? Doesn't the intermediary that narrowed the list from several billion possible matches to the best 10, including correcting the inherent spelling errors in the query carry some value?

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

#274

Post by podperson » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 2:43 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #272

othermaciej wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Android phone design looked like this: http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/androidphone.jpg Then iPhone came out and it looked like this: http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/... Now Android phones look like this: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2795/4208849005_dd4b608729.jp... You don't see any signs of copying here?

turtles all the way down, my friend: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_YgpHa1oeHME/TTxZAZWLaxI/AAAAAAAAC_...

Yeah, point to Palm -- a company built by ex-Apple people that produced a lower-cost Newton clone.

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

#275

Post by poacher69 » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 2:55 AM UTC

cjoh wrote: post #203

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…

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!

how would you expect a search engine to be able to surface a web-page given a specific query in which there is no data to create the relationship except the signal from google engineers spamming bing with click data.

these are cases of outliers. they don't exist on the real internet, or at least where pages exist without any other data (anchor text, inlinks, outlinks, words from the query in the document) they never get surfaced from a search engine.

abscent fake click-data there is no way google could surface these documents for the specific queries. in fact google states this openly in their "attack piece". before they manually changed the rank of these document they didn't surface these either.

the only evidence of "cheating" is that bing surfaces document for which there is no known relationship between the query and the document, except for spam created by google engineers. this is evidence only of a bug in bings ranking algorithm. clearly it is using signals from google. just like google uses signal from CNN (keywords, inlinks, outlinks, anchor text, etc).

i'm sure bing is thankful to google for helping find this defect in their system and are hard at work to fix it.

people talk about bing copying search results like google invented search results and put a lot of hard work into them. in this case the only hard work they put in was designed to spam bing.

i can only conclude that google is getting worried about bing quality and has run out of ideas on how to fix their own problems.

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

#276

Post by poacher69 » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 2:58 AM UTC

contextfree wrote: post #171

alain94040 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

in 7-9% of the times google tried to spam bing. not in 7-9% of search results. this indicates that maybe google isn't that great at figuring out how to spam bing or that bing is pretty good at defending agains spam. maybe google could take some lessons from bing on cleaning up spam and problem that seems all to prevelant on google these days.

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

#277

Post by poacher69 » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:00 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #76

poacher69 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you claiming that google never scrapes bing search results pages? or any other search result pages?

poacher69, we crawl the public web. Anyone that blocks us out with robots.txt, we won't crawl. If you check bing.com/robots.txt, it has "Disallow: /search" . So no, we won't crawl Bing's search results pages. If anything, users tend to complain when search results from Lycos or wherever show up in Google.

matt, how does google do competitive relevance evaluations without scraping Bing?

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

#278

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:41 AM UTC

bkhl wrote: post #266

TimothyBurgess wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by ghurlman » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 5:22 AM UTC

trustfundbaby wrote: post #217

ghurlman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how gigantic that PR win is, if I had to come to HN to hear about it.

give it time ... that headline sells itself. If Google pushes the issue, it should be on every night news report by tomorrow night.

I'm not sure Google wants to get pulled into a conversation about automated tracking of user search data.

PR "wins" can become PR nightmares in a blink.

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

#280

Post by nlogn » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 7:29 AM UTC

othermaciej wrote: post #225

nlogn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Android devices being similar in some ways to the iPhone is even remotely analogous to what Bing is doing here. One is called healthy competition (and I don't see how Android is copying iOS). The other is literally just copying data.

The original Android phone design looked like this: http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/androidphone.jpg Then iPhone came out and it looked like this: http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/... Now Android phones look like this: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2795/4208849005_dd4b608729.jp... You don't see any signs of copying here?

They are similar in that they both are big touchscreens with no physical keyboard. Apple did not invent that by any means. That is also a shot of the Android App Drawer and not an actual homescreen. Most Android homescreens I've seen have a few widgets on them and do not look anything like a big grid of app icons like the iPhone. Also, that "original" Android phone design you point out looks a hell of a lot like a Blackberry. Android must have blatantly copied RIM by your logic.