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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

#121

Post by ugh »

ddkrone wrote: post #106
boredguy8 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I click on a screen, and what I click on, is not my data?

Of course not. Try inquiring google or bing about obtaining all the information they have gathered from your toolbar and see what response you get. Actually I'll tell you: "The gathered data is anonymous and we have no way of verifying who sent it to us". So how exactly do you own information that you have absolutely no access to and with no way to transfer to competing search companies?

That’s decidedly not what owning your clickstream data means. The argument is that users should be able to decide to give away their data, whether they can later access that data is irrelevant. Access to the collected clickstream data is simply not part of the agreement and as long as users are not coerced or tricked into agreeing that’ certainly unproblematic. (I can similarly agree to give away my photo collection without getting any right to access it ever again. That doesn’t mean that I don’t own my photo collection.)

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#122

Post by coderdude »

tygorius wrote: post #100
coderdude wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't spend exorbitant amounts of money so that they can provide value to Bing's users. If Bing's users want value they can use Google instead.

Again you put the focus on Google. And again I ask, how is Microsoft's alleged behavior harming the user? Bing's increasing market share is presumably already due to providing value. If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft", do you think that's going to make people less inclined to try Bing?

Because the focus is on Google vs. Bing, not Google vs. Bing's users or Google's users vs. Bing or users vs. users.

>how is Microsoft's alleged behavior harming the user?

It's not harming Bing's users to provide Google's results. What's in it for Google to help Bing's users? It's not as if Google is an NPO humanitarian effort to help people find the information they seek.

>If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft"

Obscure misspelled words are just one thing that Bing is able to get better results on thanks to this. They also benefit from every other kind of query that a user can make on Google.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#123

Post by moultano »

kenjackson wrote: post #120
moultano wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its because the second order effect of a click implies relevance, just as a link does. There are two pieces of information in a click, one provided by google, and the other provided by the user. Google says, "'foo.com' is a good result for [foo]." The user says, "yup." Which is providing more information here? Everyone at google is happy to admit that if the internet didn't exist, we would have a very hard time ran…

Your first statement is wrong. The user provides at least two pieces of information. 1) The search query (which you attmpted to hide in Google's information) 2) A URL they retrieve from Google Google provides one piece: 1) An ordered list By FAR the most important piece of information is the search query. In fact, given a choice between having the search query or an arbitrary ordered list, I'm sure Bing would value t…

>Google provides one piece: 1) An ordered list

That's not an accurate view of how search works. The user provides the query, but the results that are returned don't need to have anything obvious to do with the query. The terms might not be on the page, and might not be found in any data remotely associated with the page. We don't just intersect posting lists here.

Furthermore, with suggest and instant, often the query itself is provided by google.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#124

Post by rayval »

tygorius wrote: post #74
moultano wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should focus on trying to be innovative again, that was the Google I respected. 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 whol…

Is this fair? Is this ethical? Is this even legal? Oh please. At worst, Microsoft's customers are sharing results of their browsing activities, based on information you gave them. How in the world could that be illegal? Your team is really coming across as whiny on this issue, which seems to me precisely the wrong tactic to take in response to Bing's increasing market share. It makes your team look defensive, as if y…

I guess it's in the eye of the beholder.

Others interpret this situation as Bing being unable to compete effectively except by looking over Google's shoulder. And then denying it when called out with clear-cut evidence.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#125

Post by ac2u »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #40
whiletruefork wrote: post #20

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…

I don't think you read the whole article, because Matt quotes Nate Silver in saying that exact thing You said: " -Being part of '1000 signals' does not mean all signals are weighted evenly." Matt quotes Nate: "First, not all of the inputs are necessarily equal. It could be, for instance, that the Google results are weighted so heavily that they are as important as the other 999 inputs combined."

"It could be" is not evidence.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#126

Post by MarkMc »

kenjackson wrote: post #98
MarkMc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar." It is not clear to me that the user completely owns the clickstream. If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?

If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft? So if my dad calls with a question, and I search for the answer, I can't send him the link that I got from Google? Or do you mean something else?

That is exactly what I mean.

IF Google say you cannot share their data with anyone else, then you are not legally allowed to share the answer with your Dad.

IF Google say you must send a 'thank you' email to them after each query, you are legally obliged to do that.

IF Google say you cannot share their data in an automatic, 'clickstream' fashion, then you cannot legally use Microsoft's toolbar. And if you break that agreement, Microsoft cannot legally use the clickstream data you send it.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#127

Post by lallysingh »

dminor wrote: post #76

Seems like Bing is having trouble explaining exactly what they are doing, and Google is having trouble explaining why they should stop. Is it illegal? If not, why should Bing stop doing it? > I think Bing’s engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it’s due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark. Kind of rings hollow to me. If I…

Well, the whole thing's kinda meta, isn't it? The content isn't on either site, it's just, really, the content identifiers. Not even that, this is about a sorting of identifiers against arbitrary strings of text. Whatever distinctions we have here are gonna appear incredibly small (and petty), but it's really the bread and butter of search.

Both are map makers in a sense, providing guides to what they didn't create, but still spent plenty of effort to make that guide. In the literal, map-making world, the artifact is the printed map. In that world, the way to check for copyright infringement is to see if mapping errors are duplicated as well.

The presumption being that if the errors were copied, then so was the good data.

Short-term, the benefit was that users would get discounts on high-quality data, as they only had to pay for the efforts of the map-copy, not the original map data acquisition. Of course, then you're just waiting for the quality to drop, as there's less and less incentive to actually do the map-making work. The margins go down, and the original sources have to update their maps less often to keep their costs low enough to be competitive.

There isn't a printed page with web search; the product is the output of a continuously-running dataset & algorithm.

But, I'm gonna ask, in the web-search world, how do you define copying and how do you test for it? If you don't think there is a valid definition, please don't count yourself the same as the group who thinks that there is a valid definition and this isn't it. They're two separate things.

(I've framed the question how I see it, and I work for Google, but I'm obviously no official speaker -- I've only been here a few months, and don't work in search quality. This is (almost definitionally) a fanboi war of sorts, and I wanted to stay out. I probably should have :( )

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#128

Post by stumm »

angusgr wrote: post #7

Matt's assertion about "Suggested Sites" sending this data seems to be conjecture. I ran some packet captures and didn't find anything of that kind. However, if you install the Bing Toolbar then it does send URL clickstream data. It explicitly asks you beforehand if you want to send info about "the searches you do, websites you visit..." though. Full post: http://projectgus.com/2011/02/bing-google-finding-some-facts.…

The article in the WSJ insinuates that it can come from either IE or the toolbar:

Stefan Weitz, director of the Bing search engine at Microsoft, said in an interview the company studies how certain users interact with Google in order to improve Bing. It does this by looking at "clickstream data," or information that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer or the Bing search toolbar voluntarily share with the company

source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870412450457611...

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#129

Post by kenjackson »

moultano wrote: post #123
kenjackson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first statement is wrong. The user provides at least two pieces of information. 1) The search query (which you attmpted to hide in Google's information) 2) A URL they retrieve from Google Google provides one piece: 1) An ordered list By FAR the most important piece of information is the search query. In fact, given a choice between having the search query or an arbitrary ordered list, I'm sure Bing would value t…

> Google provides one piece: 1) An ordered list That's not an accurate view of how search works. The user provides the query, but the results that are returned don't need to have anything obvious to do with the query. The terms might not be on the page, and might not be found in any data remotely associated with the page. We don't just intersect posting lists here. Furthermore, with suggest and instant, often the que…

I didn't say the ordered list was obvious. But it is an ordered list (at least to the user -- it may not be ordered all the way down or partially so).

Fair enough point about suggest and instant. In those cases Google is adding value to the query, but I think we'd both agree that it is incrementally so. Instant generally just helps you get to the eventual query faster. Spell checking does add value, but its a +epsilon. In either case, your right, we should add this to our function.

In any case I think my point still holds. The query is the most important aspect. The browsed page, for indexing purposes is the second most important aspect. The association between the query and the URL is the least important aspect.

IOW, the least value for Bing is the search algorithm. The query and page to add to the index (as a browsed page) are the most important.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#130

Post by DenisM »

thezilch wrote: post #108
boredguy8 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this isn't a settled issue. If clickstream data is 1 of 1000 signals, and you create clickstream data for a specialized query that will never trigger off another signal, then your created data will be reflected. That sounds exactly like what happened. You'd have to make the argument that using this data is wrong, somehow. But to make that argument, you'd basically have to argue that users shoul…

Accept in the "original" [torsoraphy] search. Forget Bing having to compete with Google's "spell correction team;" Bing need only use Google [copy] as a high frequency signal on tailing queries. That sounds like exactly what happened, and it's wrong.

Look at it this way:

Google is setting trends on tail terms due to its massive market share. Once the trend is set, Bing captures the trend by monitoring user's behavior and provides that to the other users. By reflecting user's behavior in its own index, Bing seems to replicate the Google's index structure which created that behavior. Had there been no Google, there would have been different trends and Bing would capture those instead.

It's not Bing's fault that Google is so influential, and certainly not a reason for them to stop dedcuing relevance frm user behavior. Just because Google creates trends, does not mean they own trends. The users own their own behavior and are free to share it.

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