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Bing search results showing up in Google

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Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#31

Post by ajays »

gorset wrote: post #18
aristidb wrote: post #2

robots.txt applies to the source of the links, not the target. So if, say, http://www.paulgraham.com/ links to http://m.bing.com/search , then http://m.bing.com/robots.txt does not apply to that. EDIT: If you think this is wrong, please explain it instead of just downvoting me, because I think it is pretty unfair that I lose karma for explaining my interpretation.

yup. Anchor text is fair game. Keywords taken from anchor texts are usually a good indication on what the linked page is about. A page can have a high page rank without ever being crawled - given that other high ranked pages have linked to it with good keywords in the anchor text. Such pages can often be identified by the lack of snippet texts. Edit: I may have misunderstood you, you can only use the data found in li…

If a page is not crawlable, but listed in the search results based on anchor text (or the URL), then it will not have any snippets. You can show snippets only if you crawl the page itself.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#33

Post by unp3rs0n »

jedsmith wrote: post #13

With respect to the author, the conclusion here is very flawed. If you search for Bing in Google, you get Bing all over page 1. If you search for Google in Bing, you get Google all over page 1. That's not the result of Google capturing click stream data from Google Chrome and copying Bing's results, nor is it the result of Microsoft capturing click stream data from IE8 and copying Google's results. That's just the na…

I don't understand why everyone is using the term "copying the results". I think what Bing did was very smart, they incorporated user clickstream data. One could accuse this method of walking a thin line morally, but I suspect that Google's accusation wouldn't have stood any water as a lawsuit.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#34

Post by sid0 »

ajays wrote: post #26
sid0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google proved it with the bing sting They didn't prove anything. Every experiment needs a control. Where's Google's?

"Control" what? Where's the control for "gravity pulled the apple down" ? It's called an existential proof. If you want to prove that a black swan exists, all you need is 1 example of a black swan.

It's called an existential proof. If you want to prove that a black swan exists, all you need is 1 example of a black swan.

Strictly speaking, yes, non-controlled experiments exist. However without a control you cannot eliminate alternate explanations. Since we know that an alternate explanation exists here, the experiment doesn't show anything.

In the case of the black swan there's no credible explanation for that thing you see being anything but a black swan. The control is essentially Occam's razor.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#35

Post by haberman »

Never underestimate the ability of a human being to rationalize.

If I was in the Microsoft camp, I'm sure I would also be grasping at straws to explain why it's totally fine for Bing to use Google's search results. It's human nature to rationalize.

The bottom line is that Bing's index contains associations that it could never have figured out if Google hadn't figured them out first. How many there are, we cannot know. There's no way around the fact that Bing is piggybacking on the work of Google's search engineers.

Is it "good for the customer?" In the short term, it's good for the customer if they can buy $1 bootlegged DVDs. In the long term, it's bad for the consumer if the money goes to bootleggers instead of the people who are doing the actual work.

Think I'm exaggerating the effect of just "1 out of 1000 signals?" This argument would be extremely easy to refute. Stop using Google's results. If it really isn't that significant, then why should it be a problem to stop using it? Just turn it off and let everyone observe that the quality is 99.9% as good as it used to be, and avoid any accusation of copying.

By refusing to turn it off, Microsoft makes it clear that it is an important part of their index, and that they have no qualms about having an important part of their index ripped off wholesale from their biggest competitor. Maybe it's a smart business move. But if that's the case, spare us the outrage about being called "copyists."

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#36

Post by jsnell »

> never mind that Bing only used its toolbar as a url discovery device

That is obviously untrue, and shows that the author does not understand the issue even superficially. The Google experiment showed that Bing was associating urls to search terms for no reason other than that Google had done so. You know, like making a search for mbzrxpgjys return rim.com, a URL which we can safely assume Bing was already quite aware of.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#37

Post by riffraff »

jedsmith wrote: post #13

With respect to the author, the conclusion here is very flawed. If you search for Bing in Google, you get Bing all over page 1. If you search for Google in Bing, you get Google all over page 1. That's not the result of Google capturing click stream data from Google Chrome and copying Bing's results, nor is it the result of Microsoft capturing click stream data from IE8 and copying Google's results. That's just the na…

It's possible the author may have intended that: .1 since search results are only accessed through a search action, and not links in the wild .2 since even if links in the wild are followed the google bot should have respected the disallow /search rule (which may have no standard, but google usually respect the format used in that robots.txt, and results are in both cases as of this writing) 3. therefore, they got to know such pages by using clickstream data

But I'm just guessing.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#38

Post by zaidf »

haberman wrote: post #35

Never underestimate the ability of a human being to rationalize. If I was in the Microsoft camp, I'm sure I would also be grasping at straws to explain why it's totally fine for Bing to use Google's search results. It's human nature to rationalize. The bottom line is that Bing's index contains associations that it could never have figured out if Google hadn't figured them out first. How many there are, we cannot know…

By that standard, Google should also quit trying to integrate invite-your-fb-friends feature, right? Cuz it's essentially facebook who has figured out how to get massive user signups with their real data and it's google trying to leech.

Instead of not trying to integrate fb, Google is accusing fb of not opening up the data. So when it's convenient, you want data opened up. When it's not convenient, you scream "copycat!".

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#39

Post by luigi »

unp3rs0n wrote: post #33
jedsmith wrote: post #13

With respect to the author, the conclusion here is very flawed. If you search for Bing in Google, you get Bing all over page 1. If you search for Google in Bing, you get Google all over page 1. That's not the result of Google capturing click stream data from Google Chrome and copying Bing's results, nor is it the result of Microsoft capturing click stream data from IE8 and copying Google's results. That's just the na…

I don't understand why everyone is using the term "copying the results". I think what Bing did was very smart, they incorporated user clickstream data. One could accuse this method of walking a thin line morally, but I suspect that Google's accusation wouldn't have stood any water as a lawsuit.

Because by incorporating clickstream data from Google, they're effectively copying Google search results. Bing should blacklist Google from its clickstream data.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#40

Post by ajays »

jsnell wrote: post #36

> never mind that Bing only used its toolbar as a url discovery device That is obviously untrue, and shows that the author does not understand the issue even superficially. The Google experiment showed that Bing was associating urls to search terms for no reason other than that Google had done so. You know, like making a search for mbzrxpgjys return rim.com, a URL which we can safely assume Bing was already quite awa…

the author does not understand the issue even superficially.

That, in a nutshell, is it. I don't know why we're spending so much time on this post, as the author has no idea about how search engines work, and what is robots.txt . If he had just looked at Bing's robots.txt and the URLs in Google's results, he would have seen that each and every one of them passed robots.txt . Since he site-restricted the search to ".bing.com", naturally you _will_ get only Bing results!

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