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And if they are not relying on facebook, why not just get rid of it all together?
"Because it helps the users". Oh I see. But so does Bing's actions.
"Because its individual users giving permission" Same with Bing.
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 work in search quality at Google. I'm busting my ass every day working on fundamental reimaginings of how results get ranked. I'm going to keep doing that regardless of what bing does, because it makes the world a better place, and it's fun.
But, suppose the stuff I'm working on works out, and tomorrow Google shows up with a wholly new set of awesome results. This is very possible, there is a ton of headroom left in search quality, I've seen the experiments myself.
Then after a few weeks of sniffing clicks, Bing comes up with the same set of revolutionary results, but they have no idea how they got there, they have no idea what the evidence is to rank them there, all they know is that people like those results on Google. Is this fair? Is this ethical? Is this even legal?
People in this whole debate have the idea that the user is creating this association between the result and the query, like the user searched through the whole web and came back saying "hey microsoft, check out this great result for this query! I found it! Isn't is awesome?" They aren't. Users click on whatever results you put in front of them, generally starting with the top and working their way down.
Ranking results is not a science with some objective optimal conclusion. Ranking results is fundamentally subjective, and while data-driven, is ultimately an opinion. The user does have some discriminating power in this whole feedback loop, but it's miniscule compared to Google figuring out how to show them that result in the first place. Bing is taking the closest proxy that they can practically acquire for Google's opinion, and using it directly in their ranking.
> Well, no, that's a research paper that says that they have made experiments in that direction, but this doesn't imply that this is currently done in Bing.
I answered Matt's questions and raised some other points, still waiting for an answer. Matt, could you please comment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent analysis, thank you, especially in the distinction between "suggested sites" and the Bing toolbar's behavior. I can't argue with your methods. However, I do differ with some of your conclusions: > The behaviour I’ve seen explains Google’s experiments, but does not support the accusation that Bing set out to copy Google. I don't think it's so much about "set out to copy Google" necessarily, as it is that the…
The difference is that Google has proven that the results of certain queries are being directly fed as Bing results. If Microsoft does the same with Google rankings, I'd see your point, but right now the evidence only points in one direction. However, these are also the only experiments that have been run - outlier data, gaming the algorithms. If you only test one possible outlier scenario and don't control against a…
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…
In one of the earlier threads there was discussion of MSR being in a bubble, and this is a good example. Did the people publishing that paper realize it could look like copying Google's results? Almost certainly not; as a researcher, this would look to me like I was showing that the approach worked across the three biggest search engines. Researchers are supposed to do stuff like that! But in this other non-research context, with billions of dollars at stake and Microsoft's track record of being the evil empire, it can look very different ...
[disclaimer: I was in MSR from 1999-2005 and then did competitive strategy for MS in 2006-2007. so that influences my perspective.]
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…
Agreed. And his example of how his mom could not understand what the IE disclosure really meant in terms of information sharing is silly. Your typical mom would also does not understand the true extent of data collection from using Google's own products. Does that make it wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How likely is it that completely different ranking algorithms would turn up the solarviews.com and ruthannzaroff.com results on the first page?
I'd start with the fact that they both have the keywords of the search string in the page title and in the URL string. Look, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that two different algorithms can yield the same results without one having used the other as an "indicator". To trot out a tired phrase, correlation does not imply causation (and I'd argue you don't even have correlation at this point.)
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…