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Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

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Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#61

Post by angusgr »

magicalist wrote: post #54
angusgr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what control are you suggesting? I read a suggestion elsewhere of using only Firefox for some queries and seeing if they show up, which is silly, of couse. without a possible mechanism of action there's no point of using something as a control; I might as well wait to see if the files on my disabled usb drive show up on bing. they were "gaming the algorithms" because they suspected that the algorithms existed, and it…

Set up some other dynamic sites (not indexed or linked anywhere) with random nonsense words in their URL strings, and a single link to some unrelated site. Click the link. Repeat, wait two weeks.

Same as what google did, just not on google.com.

Of course, if Bing has other "relevance" indicators (ala BingPageRank) then this might not work because it will rule the nonsense control site irrelevant linkspam, and not put it in (even Google's experiment only got a 9% success rate.) It would be better if someone like Facebook injected the test nonsense strings in their URLs.

Something of this sort would at least show they tried to differentiate between "scrapes all clickstream data" and "uses Google's search results".

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#62

Post by kenjackson »

ddkrone wrote: post #50
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…

If this joint toolbar comes to fruition, which it never will, the crowd will decide the obvious winner for practically all queries. At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?

At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?

Speed of innovation. It's not our job to make it easy for them to have diffentiation. I just want great results. The more parity we give them with respect to data, the harder they'll have work to innovate in order to differentiate. AFAICT, that benefits us the users.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#63

Post by drivebyacct2 »

My question is... did Google install the Bing toolbar and then performing these searches on Google and click the links? If not, is Bing suggesting that users searched for those convoluted strings, in IE, with the Bing toolbar, on Google's website, and then clicked those links?

I hope this doesn't sound hyperbolic, that is really my understanding of the issue. Sorry, I'm not a big SEO guy, it's very possible my understanding or comprehension here is just flawed.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#64

Post by whiletruefork »

Charuru wrote: post #17

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?

Easy to catch and filter. But yes, in theory, this will improve results. The proportion of users clicking the 10th link on a page is much lower than those who click the 1st. If users clicking the 10th > 1st, then there is an assumed ranking problem. So clicks help fix ranking.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#65

Post by jimbokun »

webwright wrote: post #31

"Copying" was a pretty brutal word to use-- not surprising that it raised MSFT's hackles a bit. MS clearly uses toolbar users' clickstreams (on and off Google) to improve their own search efforts. Google created an artificial scenario where the ONLY input was Google search behavior and lo, the search results are exactly the same. Whether or not that steps over a line (I don't feel that it does), it's not "copying" in…

"Google created an artificial scenario where the ONLY input was Google search behavior and lo, the search results are exactly the same."

Cutts addresses this:

"As we said in our blog post, the whole reason we ran this test was because we thought this practice was happening for lots and lots of different queries, not simply rare queries."

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#66

Post by arst »

angusgr wrote: post #39
coderdude wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The part that seems interesting to me is that Google scrapes other entities' data (Reader, News, Books, Scholar) in dozens of other ways, and that behaviour is generally regarded as totally justifiable.

Those other entities can opt-out of being indexed.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#67

Post by angusgr »

coderdude wrote: post #60
angusgr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that seems interesting to me is that Google scrapes other entities' data (Reader, News, Books, Scholar) in dozens of other ways, and that behaviour is generally regarded as totally justifiable.

Because Google has a symbiotic relationship with the entities whose data it's grabbing. It uses that data to drive traffic or attention to the originators and owners of that data. Everyone wants Google to use their data to drive them traffic and those who do not use robots.txt. Bing is being parasitic to Google in this situation by generating no value for them.

That's not how the AFP felt about Google News when it launched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#News_agencies

or how some publishers felt about Google Books when it launched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Copyright_infringe...

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#68

Post by gregable »

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…

What is being data mined is a bit more than a user broadcasting their own preference on the correct result. The user is broadcasting a URL which is selected based on two factors:

- the user's preference

- Google's ranking algorithm.

Had Google not ranked that URL, the user wouldn't be broadcasting it. If there was some way to extract the factor of the user's preference of URLs as a signal without the factor of Google's ranking algorithm, you would be more spot on. Unfortunately this isn't possible. Also, in most cases the ranking algorithm component of this broadcasted data is the more useful factor of the two.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#69

Post by qeorge »

kenjackson wrote: post #22
pessimist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Absolutely on all of those sites. And Wikipedia. Why would I not want them to? The only reason I could think of that I would not want them to is if I thought it would create worse search links as a result. Although being able to personallize the search queries would be incredible. So when I search for "Movie XYZ" -- it can also look at my clickstream and see that I spend a lot of time in Netflix and Netflix has that…

Well put. Further, I think Google has made a mistake drawing such a line in the sand here, and potentially missing out on a cool feature.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#70

Post by coderdude »

angusgr wrote: post #67
coderdude wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Google has a symbiotic relationship with the entities whose data it's grabbing. It uses that data to drive traffic or attention to the originators and owners of that data. Everyone wants Google to use their data to drive them traffic and those who do not use robots.txt. Bing is being parasitic to Google in this situation by generating no value for them.

That's not how the AFP felt about Google News when it launched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#News_agencies or how some publishers felt about Google Books when it launched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Copyright_infringe...

The AFP could have opted out if they wanted to. Copyright and fair use laws are not something we should be dragging into this. Your examples have nothing to do with the argument at hand between Google and Bing.
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