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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?

#61

Post by va_coder »

mooism2 wrote: post #13
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?

Google don't object to meta search engines (e.g. Dogpile) aggregating their results with those of other search engines. Google are objecting to Bing seemingly passing off Google results as Bing's own (and not including their ads, no doubt). It's clearly legitimate for Bing to index a Google results page if it follows a link to it (assuming absence of robots.txt etc) and visa versa. Does it matter that Bing obtained t…

That's why it's interesting.

You say Google adds value. Other's don't think so.

Why can't I add value to Google's content and present it in my own way?

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

nailer wrote: post #52
Drewjw81 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 surprisi…

> Google asked users to click on their bogus results. Got a citation for that?

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by spydum »

dspillett wrote: post #50
nailer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As it's been pointed out, Bing compares more than just the clickstream datapoints. You have to imagine they provide some PageRank/domain weighting to the relevance. So if you setup a dummy site with no existing pagerank/weight, and performed the same experiement, you likely would not see the same results. However, since you can imagine Google is heavily weighted, those data point score high and can rapidly reflect in Bing search results.

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

#64

Post by mooism2 »

va_coder wrote: post #61
mooism2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't object to meta search engines (e.g. Dogpile) aggregating their results with those of other search engines. Google are objecting to Bing seemingly passing off Google results as Bing's own (and not including their ads, no doubt). It's clearly legitimate for Bing to index a Google results page if it follows a link to it (assuming absence of robots.txt etc) and visa versa. Does it matter that Bing obtained t…

That's why it's interesting. You say Google adds value. Other's don't think so. Why can't I add value to Google's content and present it in my own way?

I didn't say that Google adds value. Are you talking about Google Search, Google News, or another of their activities as "adding value" or not? Please don't put words into my mouth.

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

#65

Post by davidu »

dexen wrote: post #59
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...

Are you kidding yourself consciously or just 8 years behind the news? @_@ http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=goog%20msft Note how MSFT is swinging around 0% growth, while GOOG is steadily between +20% and +60% growth, in regard to share prices. The market has spoken some time ago, and the trend doesn't look like changing anytime near soon.

You fail to understand how to interpret a "relative growth" chart. Google is not "steadily between +20% and +60% growth."

Since a random point in time picked by WA it shows what you would be up on another random point in time. If you look at the historical returns of MSFT vs GOOG there is no competition. You're original $10,000 in MSFT would be worth many millions and your GOOG stock would be worth less than $100,000.

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

#66

Post by jrwoodruff »

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…

Read the rest of it. The last half ties the argument together quite nicely.

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

#67

Post by chawco »

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.

My issue with it is this: Had Google not created a better algorithm would those users be clicking on those links? If Google shut down today would Microsoft be able to associate those sites with the search terms?

I should think the answer to the above is 'no' in both cases, which is why this is cheating. It's probably not illegal, but I find the practice to be unethical.

Ask yourself this: If Google shut down today, would Microsoft be providing more relevant, equally relevant or less relevant results for those searches? If the answer is less relevant, then I think it's clear there's been a lapse of ethics.

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

#68

Post by patrickas »

user24 wrote: post #34
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?

>Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt

I think that's what most people though was wrong in your comment.

Care to elaborate on how an adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt in that fictive scenario?

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

#69

Post by va_coder »

mooism2 wrote: post #64
va_coder wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it's interesting. You say Google adds value. Other's don't think so. Why can't I add value to Google's content and present it in my own way?

I didn't say that Google adds value. Are you talking about Google Search, Google News, or another of their activities as "adding value" or not? Please don't put words into my mouth.

I'm talking about Google taking pictures of my house, snippets of books i've written or or other people's web pages with copies of articles i've written and displaying them without my permission. They seem to think that's ok because they "added value".

Well now people are adding value to Google's products and presenting them in a new way. This opens up a can of worms for Google.

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

#70

Post by user24 »

patrickas wrote: post #68
user24 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt I think that's what most people though was wrong in your comment. Care to elaborate on how an adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt in that fictive scenario?

If extensions checked to see if they had permission to alter/interfere/access webpages by looking it up in robots.txt, which is what is being suggested by people who say "Bing toolbar violated robots.txt", then that same mechanism could be used to specify:

    User-Agent:adblock
    Disallow: /
Or even, if the "User-Agent: (star)" is supposed to tell Bing Toolbar not to play about with the page, then why doesn't that also apply to all your other extensions/addon/BHO's/plugins whatever you want to call them?
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