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Bing search results showing up in Google

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Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#41

Post by joesb »

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…

I can not agree more with your second paragraph.

Yes, Bing toolbar just rely on people clicking links. But without Google doing all the hardwork here, users will never know about such link, that's why they went to Google. And there will not be any of such link to feed to Bing's system.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#42

Post by haberman »

zaidf wrote: post #38
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 "copyca…

Google was freely sharing contact data with Facebook, so there's no hypocrisy here. Contact data is not the same as a search engine.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#43

Post by ajays »

luigi wrote: post #39
unp3rs0n wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. It is possible that Google incorporates clickstream data too.

The problem that Google's little experiment highlighted was: given the utter lack of any other signal, Bing uses the fact that that URL was ranked #1 by Google's search engine and clicked on by a user.

Having said that: had I been doing this experiment at Google, I would have also added the following variations:

- for some search terms, rank the honeypot URL #1 but don't click on it

- for some search terms, rank the honeypot URL #1 on some _other_ search engine's list and click on it. How can they do that? There are search engines out there which use Google in the backend.

Experiment #1 would have shown more blatant copying. Experiment #2 would have shown whether it's just Google, or any other search engine.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#44

Post by unp3rs0n »

luigi wrote: post #39
unp3rs0n wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's say tomorrow DDG is the search engine with the largest market share. Then Bing would be getting all the clickstream data from DDG. I hope you do realize that this "algorithm" is not Google specific. Its just a novel ranking technique that incorporates a human user feedback loop and is a pretty well known technique in the information retrieval field.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#45

Post by anonymous246 »

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…

Hmm, I'm not sure you RTFA. He didn't search for the term "bing", he searched for the term "site:.bing.com/search". So it IS kinda a big deal that they're disrespecting the robots.txt and listing those pages anyway.

I have also seen Google listing one of my domains for which I specifically disallowed all spiders (Bing doesn't show those domains FYI). My feeble attempt at separating my personal and professional personas was defeated by frigging Google's blatant disregard for Internet etiquette.

Since I'm trying to be anon here, I won't be able to list the search term. Sorry.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#46

Post by jedsmith »

anonymous246 wrote: post #45
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…

Hmm, I'm not sure you RTFA. He didn't search for the term "bing", he searched for the term "site:.bing.com/search". So it IS kinda a big deal that they're disrespecting the robots.txt and listing those pages anyway. I have also seen Google listing one of my domains for which I specifically disallowed all spiders (Bing doesn't show those domains FYI). My feeble attempt at separating my personal and professional person…

> So it IS kinda a big deal that they're disrespecting the robots.txt and listing those pages anyway.

Did you RMFC? The robots.txt doesn't match what is indexed. As has been exhaustively pointed out in this thread by more than a few commenters, "Search" != "search". On that very search results page, we see #1 which is:

> OLAC search - Bing

OLAC is an unrelated site, and at one point it apparently linked to "www.bing.com/search" with the anchor text "OLAC search - Bing", which Google faithfully indexed but absolutely did not fetch, as you notice there is no description. What else would "OLAC search" mean? This gives us insight into how Google indexes and that they actually respect robots.txt case-sensitively.

The second URL, m.bing.com/Search/Results.aspx, was indexed and fetched because "Search" != "search".

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#47

Post by haberman »

anonymous246 wrote: post #45
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…

Hmm, I'm not sure you RTFA. He didn't search for the term "bing", he searched for the term "site:.bing.com/search". So it IS kinda a big deal that they're disrespecting the robots.txt and listing those pages anyway. I have also seen Google listing one of my domains for which I specifically disallowed all spiders (Bing doesn't show those domains FYI). My feeble attempt at separating my personal and professional person…

They are not disrespecting robots.txt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183519

> I have also seen Google listing one of my domains for which I specifically disallowed all spiders [...] Since I'm trying to be anon here, I won't be able to list the search term. Sorry.

Unsubstantiated accusations. If you truly think Google is disregarding robots.txt but you don't want to divulge the original site, you should set up an experiment as Google has. Otherwise we have no way of determining if your accusations are true, and therefore they should not be taken seriously.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#48

Post by sajidnizami »

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.

What Bing did is very smart! It actually was, but not crediting Google there just makes it look like a cheap shot.

You won't quote someone without citing their name now would you?

Sadly you are right, they won't be able to push a lawsuit. Not enough grounds for it, however Bing should acknowledge what they did and are doing crediting Google.

If Google hadn't caught them, we would all be thinking Bing did it on its own, which really isn't the case.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#49

Post by mukyu »

ajays wrote: post #43
luigi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not necessarily. It is possible that Google incorporates clickstream data too. The problem that Google's little experiment highlighted was: given the utter lack of any other signal, Bing uses the fact that that URL was ranked #1 by Google's search engine and clicked on by a user. Having said that: had I been doing this experiment at Google, I would have also added the following variations: - for some search terms, ra…

Google has said they do not use clickstream data for ranking from Google toolbar.

They did have variations of their tests. Cutts mentioned this during the bigthink panel. Sometimes they went to Bing first or not, sometimes they clicked on the links and sometimes not, and various other things.

Re: Bing search results showing up in Google

#50

Post by mattmanser »

benologist wrote: post #27
maeon3 wrote: post #22

Microsoft is way out of line. Google figures out what content is good by crawling every page and doing the leg work, and Bing copies Google data and displays what google displays. Google proved it with the bing sting. there is absolutly NO reason why bing should have linked to those documents, other than that they copied off of Google's exam paper. When students do this, it is called plagiarizing. The smoke getting t…

They proved that Microsoft uses clickstream data to rank websites, and in 7% of manufactured cases that's all the data they have? I think this is exactly as petty and silly as last week's news, and now they get to spend a week explaining how this occurred and that they do obey robots.txt.

Except that this time it isn't Microsoft themselves crying foul.
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