Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by luigi » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 12:14 PM UTC

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.

But the effect is the same as intentional scraping and outright stealing: search results that could have only come from Google are appearing as Bing results.

Bing needs to blacklist Google from its clickstream. Simple.

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

#42

Post by fosk » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 12:33 PM UTC

I have a feeling that people's reaction on this is biased by the fact that one of the two companies is Microsoft. What happened here it's not ethically correct, but come on guys, we must be honest. This is business, it's about billions, it's about market shares. It's not a news that money is not ethical.

Google collects data too, Google does its own shit like everybody else, like Microsoft. Google has its own toolbar too. And all this story seems more a marketing move against Bing.

What I want now to happen is to have more competition, instead of crying Google should work hard to be unbeatable and competitive. History teaches us a copy it's never better than the original.

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

#43

Post by nailer » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 12:44 PM UTC

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 do not understand this.

* Are Microsoft saying end users are naturally clicking on nonsense phrases invented by Google?

* If not, what are they saying?

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

#44

Post by nhebb » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 12:46 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #6

va_coder wrote: post #4

This is starting to get interesting. Google makes money aggregating other people's content. What happens when people aggregate Google's content? What's fair?

Explain what you mean when you say that Google makes money by aggregating other people's content? Google makes money by indexing other people's content and driving traffic to other people's sites. That hardly seems like a bad thing.

http://books.google.com is considered one of the more egregious examples, with many authors and publicists having complained about Google taking samples of the content and posting it online. I did a Google search a while back on a graphics issue, and got the answer I needed from a Google book search result. You could argue (as Google does) that they are really just helping promote the book. But I have no need too buy - I got the answer for free.

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

#45

Post by andrenotgiant » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 12:49 PM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #35

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...

All it took to piece together the author's ignorance was the

"Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of “Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),”

quote down at the end. I'm sure his line of thought was: "All my friends at Starbucks have MacBook Pros, so Microsoft must be doing really badly."

Probably the same reason half his argument seemed to involve Android jealousy...

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

#46

Post by zerd » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:04 PM UTC

Dilger first asks "Bing is using Google's search results to improve its own. But what’s wrong with that?"

If Bing uses Google's search results, then we effectively only have one major search engine. Yahoo has switched to the Bing engine, and Bing gets a big chunk of it's results from Google. So we have a search engine monopoly. That's wrong with that.

> "This is the company that indexes blogs [...], and then makes all this information available without consent"

He first asks what's wrong with Bing copying Google's results, because it's public content, then says it's immoral to index public content. Double morals? Logic fail?

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

#47

Post by Encosia » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:05 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #43

greyman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not understand this. * Are Microsoft saying end users are naturally clicking on nonsense phrases invented by Google? * If not, what are they saying?

The Google engineers who planted the phrases were running the Bing toolbar themselves. That part isn't in question.

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

#48

Post by megablast » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:08 PM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #35

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...

Microsoft is still a behemoth, with its fingers in a lot of pies, but unlike Apple and Google, it has not manage to grab onto the future, yet. The future if going mobile, and services. Microsoft has so far lost the mobile race, and the big services do not use MS servers.

They are looking in the worst shape to face the future than they have ever, in the last 20 years.

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

#49

Post by Drewjw81 » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:09 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #43

greyman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not understand this. * Are Microsoft saying end users are naturally clicking on nonsense phrases invented by Google? * If not, what are they saying?

What's not to understand? Microsoft is colecting search phrases from searches people make though the IE search box. Then they are tying that data to the next page people click to after the search. Google intentionally polluted their data using odd phrases and asked users to click on their bogus results. Given that the only data bing would have for those strange phrases is polluted crap from Googlers it's not surprising that their engine that's using user supplied data would attempt to return the only match it can find.

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

#50

Post by dspillett » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 1:10 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #43

greyman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not understand this. * Are Microsoft saying end users are naturally clicking on nonsense phrases invented by Google? * If not, what are they saying?

The test wasn't natural. A number of Google people did click on the links artificially associated with the nonsense phrases, while they had Bing's toolbar active.

If the Bing toolbar is picking up on this sort of thing generically (i.e. picking keywords out of the query-string on any page and associating them with clicked links, though I'm not sure how it could with a useful degree of accuracy in a way that couldn't be "maliciously" gamed buy underhand SEO activities) then I see nothing wrong in it as long as the users have knowingly opted in to their activity being analysed in this way. It would just be indexing keywords and content just as a web spider would.

If it is specifically detecting that it is on a Google page, and/or other search competitors, than the issue is much more cloudy.