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Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

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Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#31

Post by masklinn »

geuis wrote: post #3

I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half. Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property. Google has spent bil…

> I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half.

It's dilger, why would you bother reading that tripe at all?

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#32

Post by mooism2 »

axod wrote: post #19
mooism2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

I'm pretty sure microsoft doesn't care... They're capturing what users click on, which doesn't include any information about the wishes of the website owner.

Given the case of misspellings, Bing appear to associate what the user types into a text box with the link they subsequently follow.

I think this counts as extracting information from the Google results page.

is designed to prevent search engines automatically extracting information from web pages. By involving a human in the process, Bing are (presumably) avoiding this rule. Is this a good thing?

I accept that Bing don't access the page content itself, so wouldn't be able to see the tag if it was there.

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#33

Post by wingo »

geuis wrote: post #3

I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half. Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property. Google has spent bil…

Regardless of whether you think Google is more or less evil than Microsoft, what does it matter how many billions they spent?

It's silly to hold onto some murky moral click-ownership here. It would still be silly, even if it hadn't given Google billions of dollars in profit, every quarter.

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#34

Post by user24 »

Joakal wrote: post #14

http://www.google.com/robots.txt First two lines: User-agent: * Disallow: /search

except that that's not what robots.txt is for. Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt

edit: bing toolbar is effectively an extension for MSIE. robots.txt is designed to stop spiders. Spiders aren't extensions. Therefore that's not what robots.txt is for. What did I say wrong to get downvoted?

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#35

Post by coffeemug »

Oh jeez, not again. This is the Microsoft we know and love to hate, less so now that it is falling apart and must be pitied as an underdog.

Let's see:

Market cap: Microsoft - 239.49B, Google - 195.50B. Revenue: Microsoft - 66.69B, Google - 29.32B. Profit margin: Microsoft - 30.84%, Google - 29.01%.

Falling apart. Right...

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#37

Post by dansingerman »

greyman wrote: post #24
geuis wrote: post #3

I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half. Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property. Google has spent bil…

Microsoft do NOT steal Google's search results. They use clickstream data from Bing toolbar users to improve their search results. What happened is that Google engineers engineered a use case, in which signal from those clickstream appear like a stealing of search results. Or in other words, Microsoft uses Google users behaviour in their ranking algorithm. But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.

I know this has been posited, but has it been confirmed anywhere that this is the case?

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#38

Post by rbanffy »

sajidnizami wrote: post #11

First article I've read in a while that's taking Microsoft's side in the whole situation. Every paragraph of this screams publicity. I am just wondering here if this is a PR tactic. Here I would be happy to see a balanced review of both companies behavior but this is just one sided bashing. Shame on your pretentious, obnoxious, indefensibly egregious double standard in the field of using public information to turn a…

I think that the Phineas Barnum assumption is pretty much valid and this article proves it.

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#40

Post by patio11 »

Joakal wrote: post #14

http://www.google.com/robots.txt First two lines: User-agent: * Disallow: /search

There is no robot involved. An actual human instructs their user agent to retrieve a document on Google. A piece of code, running in that user agent, does something. If anyone has a complaint here, it is the user, not Google. (Google really really doesn't want to spin this as "MS is spying on our users" because as soon as they say that some person is going to point out "Google is spying on the entire world" and that person will be right.)
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