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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?

#121
post #41
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.

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.

...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...

That's one effect. While it's vivid, it might be a tiny side-effect only notable in contrived cases.

Overall, this kind of URL-after-URL signal, extracted from every participating user, and every trail through both search sites and non-search sites, might be discovering valuable terms-in-preceding-URL-to-later-visited-URL associations. These associations might result in many search improvements, other than the one-for-one result porting Google's experiment has found. We don't really know the relative magnitude of porting-results versus other-benefits, yet I think that's important to the analysis.

If a useful automated or user-driven process generates a little indirect infringement around the edges, is that enough to demand the process be stopped entirely? Note, that's not the standard Google wants applied to user uploads to YouTube, or excerpting of news and websites onto Google services. Google says: "defend yourself, by adding opt-outs (robots.txt) or sending takedown notices, and we'll undo the incidental infringements eventually".

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

#122

The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.

> when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, http://yelp.com/robots.txt Not a mention of GoogleBot.

well, they're presented with either 1) killing their organic search traffic by blocking Google or 2) allowing the crawlers but not being able to stop their data from being aggregated and included in local results.

Yelp's API specifically says their data cannot be aggregated with other sources. When presented with that, Google simply said they weren't using the API, they were scraping.

Apparently scraping is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want if you're Google.

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

#123
post #114
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

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

The difference is that Stackoverflow says "please index us" while Google says "please don't index us".

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

#124
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"fair use" is a well-established practice for all of those things except (possibly) search results

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

#125
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Google uses the link-out of other sites to rank the linked site. So if I have a site that review sites about x, google will use my links to rank the sites about x. It will benefit google, sites about x, advertisers for x, users searching for x. But NEVER me. now, replace "me" for "google" and "google"for "bing". And you will see how you and google are being hypocrite

You may not benefit from the indexing of your link, but you certainly benefit from the indexing of other people's links. Unless, of course, you don't use search on the internet.

By your argument. Google benefits from the doing of Bing, unless of course they don't search on the internet. (the internet meaning Bing, as oposed to your comment, where the internet was meaning Google)

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

#126
I think Google is being disingenuous with their "bing is copying my data" story.

However, please avoid linking to roughlydrafted.com. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I just wanted to point out that if you have read any of the material on the site, you will know that it is just full of flamebait articles with an absurd Apple fixation.

Everything Android does is copying Apple. Everything Microsoft does is wrong and stupid. If flash is not supported on iPhone it is because it is the morally correct thing to do. When Apple announced the iPhone without an SDK roughlydrafted called developers stupid for asking for an SDK and that javascript on the web is the new SDK. This post however takes the cake, you must side with Bing because Google is a greater threat to Apple than Microsoft. Seriously, how does Overture even enter into this discussion. It is tiresome to see this site linked to all over the web.

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

#127
post #28

I had to reread the original Google article to verify a point. The signal Bing is alleged to be using is that users CLICKED on the result that came up ... not the results that just came up first in Google upon a search query. And these are users who agreed to install the Bing toolbar! Here's a hypothesis. I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured f…

From your comment: I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. From the official Google blog: We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted.

The search text is in the referring URL no matter where it was typed in. It's captured without ever looking at Google.

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

#128
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The difference is that Stackoverflow says "please index us" while Google says "please don't index us".

and they don't need to index or crawl google pages to do what they are doing.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Imagine the Google terms of service said, 'Users must not share any information we provide with anyone else'. Does that mean that use of the Microsoft toolbar would violate these terms and Google could sue Microsoft to stop them using the 'clickstream' data?

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

#130
post #60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So MS are saying Google themselves uploaded the data to MS by using Bing toolbar? Does Google agree their engineers did this?

Yes. From the original article yesterday: This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.

No. There's a difference between having the toolbar installed but typing something into the google.com directly (which actually occurred) and typing something into the Bing toolbar.
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