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?

#81

Post by recoiledsnake » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:21 PM UTC

cpr wrote: post #72

greyman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I partially agree, but with some caveats: 1. Future is also in the games, and here Microsoft has a very competitive product (xbox/kinect) 2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android). It just came late to the game, but it is not yet clear if too late. I personally think they can catch up with throwing enough m…

2. & 3.) It's very, very late to come to these races with nothing truly compelling to show. I think they've already lost, but, nothing's sure...

Expect a big push for WP7 once it available on Verizon/Sprint. Microsoft in underdog mode is a very different and dangerous beast. See Windows,Xbox, Word, Excel, NT, Exchange, .NET, IE. The first few versions were laughed at and dismissed but later ones mostly blew away the competition(yes, IE was better than Netscape in the 4.0 and 5.0 days while Netscape took forever to release their 6.0).

Apple likes to retreat into it's niche where it controls everything (helps avoid antitrust regulators breathing down its neck) and has high margins. This is already happening with the iPhone. Android while gaining in popularity, lacks the polish in the UI and performance.

Even with much better raw hardware, Android performs worse compared to Windows Phone 7. See http://pockethacks.com/windows-phone-7-smoother-than-dual-co...

The going empirical formula is version 3 of their products are when they start becoming good. While WP7 is technically version 7, it's actually a complete reboot of the platform with zero backward compatibility. They're taking the middle route between iPhone and Android, having variety in hardware but strict hardware requirements to prevent fragmentation and a controlled app ecosystem. That said, they don't have a good tablet strategy. Maybe Windows 8 will really be tablet optimized, or maybe tablet hardware will catch up to make it run smoothly(the Win UI is still a hard problem on tablets though). Or maybe they will port the Windows Phone UI to tablets.

In short, very interesting times are ahead in the mobile/tablet space and it would be a mistake to write Microsoft off.

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

#82

Post by lukeschlather » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:22 PM UTC

user24 wrote: post #70

patrickas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ap…

It should, if they're sending data back to the mothership. Alexa's toolbar among others should respect robots.txt

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

#83

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:23 PM UTC

greyman wrote: post #57

megablast wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I partially agree, but with some caveats: 1. Future is also in the games, and here Microsoft has a very competitive product (xbox/kinect) 2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android). It just came late to the game, but it is not yet clear if too late. I personally think they can catch up with throwing enough m…

2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android).

I would say that WP7 has a superior conception to iOS, and I am a hardcore iPhone user. My phone is really about my communications and managing my data away from home. Apps are only a means to that end. Right now iOS is pretty App centric. WP7 on the other hand is personal data centric, which in the long run will provide better functionality for "managing my data away from home" with less friction.

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

#84

Post by tree_of_item » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:29 PM UTC

zerd wrote: post #46

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 al…

Where did he say it is immoral to index public content?

Google complains about Bing using public content. Google uses public content.

Snarky question? Fail?

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

#85

Post by tree_of_item » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

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 didn't even read the article. It's late and I'm not going to bother addressing any of the author's points.

But he's wrong.

I can't understand why people make posts like this.

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

#86

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:39 PM UTC

Drewjw81 wrote: post #54

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…

Since nailer's comment on my other post can't be directly replied to. From googles mouth http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... "We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bi…

What may be misleading about Google's statement is that it paints the picture of engineers hunched over laptops patiently typing in nonsense queries a keystroke at a time.

I guess I just have trouble seeing it taking more than about 3 minutes before 20 of the top industry engineers figured out a way to automate the process. Which is pretty long compared to the 2 seconds it would take for them to start thinking of ways to improve the SEO.

It's the human factor in Google's "experiment" that just doesn't fit. If they wanted a controlled approach, they would have written an application and run it and logged everything. Instead, it appears that they provided laptops so that the engineers could experiment and innovate their way to exploiting the Bing toolbar.

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

#87

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:42 PM UTC

spydum wrote: post #63

dspillett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But it only worked 7% of the time despite 20 Google engineers' best efforts, the honeypots being ranked number 1, and the data repeatedly sent to Bing.

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

#88

Post by droz » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:48 PM UTC

tnorthcutt wrote: post #78

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the article switches back and forth between serif and sans-serif font?

Nope. Just you.

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

#89

Post by HardyLeung » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:55 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #74

kevin_morrill wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put up a terms of use or force users to accept a license agreement. They do no such thing today. So I think you'd have a hard time saying Microsoft has done anything legally wrong here.

Google already has terms of service. You agree to them by using Google. http://www.google.com/accounts/ 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services thr…

In this case I don't think Microsoft violates Google's TOS because it is not directly consuming the "service" provided by Google, but rather peeking at what the user has done (and by installing the toolbar the user has already agreed to let Bing do it).

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

#90

Post by haberman » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 3:56 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.

> They use clickstream data from Bing toolbar users to improve their search results.

If that leads to Bing absorbing Google's results, and eg. suggesting spelling corrections they would have never figured out except that Google thought of them first, then they are indeed stealing results, whether they meant to or not, and need to stop.

George Harrison didn't mean to copy the song "He's So Fine" when he wrote his song "My Sweet Lord," but he lost the lawsuit anyway and had to pay damages. Whether you call it "clickstream" or "user behavior," Bing is incorporating an association that could only have come from Google, and Google's robots.txt makes it very clear that robots are not allowed to mine search results.

> But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.

As has been mentioned many times, Google does not take user behavior from the toolbar as a signal for ranking.