Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate • Hacker News Board

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#11

Post by angusgr » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:27 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #3

Let’s take that thought to its conclusion. If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing…

I agree with you. Particularly, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this seems like a very biased suggestion.

All of the negative perception seems to come from Google deliberately inserting outlier data. For MS to back down on that basis immediately makes them look like they were doing much more than what is proven.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#12

Post by moultano » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

user24 wrote: post #6

Oh man. That research paper he quoted strongly indicates that MS is specifically targeting Google. I was totally wrong. Bing are copying Google. I'm sorry (I am the "What on earth are Google thinking" author). I still think the honeypot experiments didn't support the conclusion. But this paper coupled with Bing's lacklustre pseudo-denial strongly indicates that my view of events was not accurate and that Bing were in…

Those examples to me are like finding a maggot in a piece of meat. Maybe that's the only one, and if you just remove it the rest is ok, but it's going to make you pretty suspicious especially if it already smells.

The reality is that it's almost impossible for google to measure how much their results influence bing. After all, they are both trying to rank the same internet. The best they can do is prove the obvious cases and let bing do the explaining.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#13

Post by coderdude » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

davidu wrote: post #5

I think Matt lays out a strong argument for why they have made such a stink. And it sounds like a pretty compelling defense for their actions to go public. But... 1) I think they will regret it bigtime when all the attention they are causing makes the bored government officials poke their head in and realize that at a macro level, neither Bing nor Google does anything to protect user search privacy. 2) I think Google…

I'm certain they never stopped trying to be innovative, but Bing is able to use that click stream data to reap the benefits of Google's innovations. Google is on the right side of this argument even if it makes them seem whiny to some people.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#14

Post by angusgr » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:30 PM UTC

jarin wrote: post #9

As to how strongly Bing uses Google as an "indicator", I think the results from this definitely-not-long-tail search are pretty telling: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+are+you http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+old+are+you

How is that telling, exactly?

The top 4 results (including one which has the domain name of the query) are the same but in a different order. The rest of the results appear totally different.

Even if one random query you ran returned an identical first 10 results, exactly what would that prove? Statistically significant how?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#15

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:31 PM UTC

jarin wrote: post #9

As to how strongly Bing uses Google as an "indicator", I think the results from this definitely-not-long-tail search are pretty telling: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+are+you http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+old+are+you

I agree...

So just between us, is this an indication that Bing uses Google strongly or doesn't use it strongly?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#16

Post by pessimist » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:31 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #3

Let’s take that thought to its conclusion. If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing…

I wonder if you would be ok if Bing did the same thing to amazon. That is, imagine they used toolbar/IE logs to infer that people went to amazon, searched for LCD TVs and then purchased model X. Then they could boost pages about X in search, or implement a "bestselling" feature. After all, they are "just" using clickstream data here. Similarly, they could track Netflix, and so on.

IMHO, there's a loophole in Bing's argument that the user click data is free for them to use. What about the site - do they have no ability to consent/dissent to being tracked?

Maybe robots.txt needs to be updated for the toolbar.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#17

Post by Charuru » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:32 PM UTC

Just watched the video. It's evident that Bing uses clicks as one of its signals. So a possible SEO tactic now would be to spam clicks on your link?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#18

Post by jarin » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:32 PM UTC

angusgr wrote: post #14

jarin wrote: post #9

As to how strongly Bing uses Google as an "indicator", I think the results from this definitely-not-long-tail search are pretty telling: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+are+you http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+old+are+you

How is that telling, exactly? The top 4 results (including one which has the domain name of the query) are the same but in a different order. The rest of the results appear totally different. Even if one random query you ran returned an identical first 10 results, exactly what would that prove? Statistically significant how?

How likely is it that completely different ranking algorithms would turn up the solarviews.com and ruthannzaroff.com results on the first page?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#19

Post by user24 » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #8

user24 wrote: post #6

Oh man. That research paper he quoted strongly indicates that MS is specifically targeting Google. I was totally wrong. Bing are copying Google. I'm sorry (I am the "What on earth are Google thinking" author). I still think the honeypot experiments didn't support the conclusion. But this paper coupled with Bing's lacklustre pseudo-denial strongly indicates that my view of events was not accurate and that Bing were in…

In the spirit of completeness, the paper says they use Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But the paper doesn't say this is what Bing uses. Looks like it, but we should be clear. This is MSR, not Bing. Good paper though. But it is another example of MS actually not thinking its bad. They published a paper on this where they spell out how MSR would do this. Did people in the academic community protest that this would be copying…

Yeah, I mean you could make the argument that it's just one piece of MS research among thousands of others, etc etc, but the fact that they've sunk resource into literally spying on Google (et al) is just too much. It could still turn out that Bing don't use that technique... but it's looking a lot less likely. Especially given this whole thing started based on Google noticing their spelling corrections popping up on Bing, and stealing Google's spelling corrections is exactly what this paper was about.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#20

Post by whiletruefork » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 10:35 PM UTC

Matt Cutts should know better. Being part of '1000 signals' does not mean all signals are weighted evenly. It does not even mean the signals are weighted the same across all query types. This is machine learning - the actual weighting is learned and dynamic (always shifting) and not controlled. And there is absolutely no reason for Microsoft to take out a particular signal just because Google asked. There needs to be proof of unethical behavior, of which there is none.

The Chrome and Gmail EULA's are as bad as the IE8 Suggested Sites bit mentioned in this article. GMail basically reads your email to provide contextually relevant ads. Does my mom know that? No.

Not a plug, but I blogged about this @ http://roshank.posterous.com/google-versus-bing-no-one-is-be... . I believe this should be a discussion on ethics - and feel it is ethical for a company to do whatever it wants with data contained in its own software application.