Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

I haven't got much to add since I've expressed my views previously, plus this blog post does a good job of calmly pointing out the issues. It's worth emphasising the penultimate paragraph from the blog post since I feel it's key here though:

"Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It's because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing's rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says "we don't know how much of this win came from Google" does a disservice to everyone. 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"

I agree with this entirely. Given Bing's resources, it seems bizarre that they were relying on Google's results even a little bit. And until they sort this issue out, I definitely agree that it's difficult to know when to give credit to Bing.

(Plus it's made all the more difficult considering that Bing keep sort of denying this whole mess, despite the quite conclusive proof. I suspect that if they do stop using Google's results, we won't know about it considering the hole that Bing have dug themselves with their denials. Ah well, que sera sera).

I am still amazed that Goggle even looks at or cares about Bing results. That is not a good sign. It makes them look vulnerable.

PS: I haven't checked out our competitors pages for months, too many ideas of my own.

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 indeed blatantly piggybacking off Google's hard work.

I'm really disappointed. I gave Bing the benefit of the doubt, saw that there was another conclusion which explained Google's observations and I advocated that. But now it really looks like MS overstepped the mark and were deliberately picking out Google URLs in order to use signals from Google's algorithms to improve Bing.

That really is cheating.

edit: although still it's not conclusive. I don't know what to think now. I think I should stick to writing code :)

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 if implemented?

Check your competitors page right now. It will take you less time than reading the next post on Hacker News, and what you find may (or may not) surprise you. That consulting tip is on the house. :-)