What was that saying: "If you can't beat em, join em"?
disclaimer: this is not my acknowledgement that I agree with the practice.
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
101–110 of 288 posts
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clickable: http://bigthink.com/series/62
I couldn't find the streaming video from there. Did anyone find it?
I guess they'll put the streaming video up when it starts (10am PST, so in just under 2 hours). That seemed like the most appropriate page to link to.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#103Google scrapes websites to determine search results. Bing scrapes websites (Google) to determine search results. What's the problem?
Look at it like a math problem... Google takes all numbers and figures out the answer itself. Bing writes down the answer from Google's paper. They are hardly the same. Your comment is somewhat like saying "Hey, we're all writing down numbers"
Customers care about results, not about how hard you worked to get those results.
This is a fundamental difference between student reward-schedules and rest-of-life reward schedules.
There's no credit for effort, unless you can spin it that way in your marketing / branding.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#104Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no? Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.
You are misunderstanding the word, 'Copy'. Here, it does not mean like "3-D movies is a great idea, lets copy it from avatar" . Its more on the lines on "This code is great, lets copy it" . Copy == getting inspired by brilliance of an idea and implement on your own in the first case. Copy == stealing in the latter case. Copying (Ctrl C+ Ctrl V), google search results is theft, not "getting inspired" from previous bod…
When identical inputs create identical outputs using different algorithms, it's reverse engineering not copying.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and feeding that data back into their own search results, rather than just using it for analysis to see how your competitors are performing? If I'm in the business of giving horse racing tips and I read your tips to see what your strike rate is compared to mine, that's one thing. If I start tipping the same horses as you, purely because you tipped them, that's quite another thing.
Microsoft isn't using strike rate data in the important sense which you imply - the strike rate for Google is advertising revenue. It's not as if Microsoft is collecting info on the advertisements displayed and then soliciting those advertisers to spend their dollars on Bing (at least that's not part of the allegations). I am pretty confident that Google feeds every bit of legally collected relevant data back into th…
no, the "strike rate" is precision/recall. Good advertising CTRs is a side-effect of relevancy. Relevancy is measured by precision and recall.
edit to expand: If the measure by which a search engine evaluated itself was advertising revenues, they'd all have massive intrusive adverts, and no users. The only viable measure can be the quality of the search results themselves. As a happy coincidence, if you build something capable of delivering high quality results, you can very easily use that to produce highly relevant adverts. Imagine that each advert is like a little webpage, and rank them just the same as you do for normal webpages. (caveat: there's no link graph for adverts, so we're reduced to using a simpler text mining approach, eg bag of words vector space la-di-da).
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can test that Microsoft's software sends the clicks back to Microsoft, although I believe Microsoft sends the data back by SSL, so it's harder to verify even that than you'd expect. Google's search results are blocked in robots.txt, so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly. All the evidence points to users' clicks on Google, which are then sent to Microsoft. Microsoft has (so…
Matt, don't Google Toolbar and the Chrome Browser similarly send information to Google for use in improving their services?
If you read the article and other comments here it's been made perfectly clear that the Google toolbar and Chrome browser are not sending similar data back to Google.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#107Google gathers lots of user data on 3rd party websites via services such as (to name a few):
- Google analytics (opted in for data sharing)
- Chrome
- Google toolbar
@Matt Cutts - I'd love it if you could confirm exactly which user data you DO and DO NOT use to influence rankings. Or, at the very least say on record that you don't do what Bing are doing and use data from bing.com
Overall, I'm not surprised that Bing are doing this for some keywords - all the major search engines use a massive number of different signals. I'll be more surprised if it turns out this is happening at a large scale or for competitive terms.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#108I had a front row seat for this test. I believe the experiment we ran provides conclusive proof. I'm on a panel with a representative from Bing later today and I'll ask Bing about this directly.
Bing copying Google's search results is just evil. Not like copying Apple's iPhone design and user interface and giving it away to Apple's competitors, which is good. Right?
It's ugly and immoral and probably legal. Good job catching Microsoft at it (and I think the really really unethical and scary bit is that Microsoft is cheerfully stealing info from users via their browser). I also realize that Google got where it is in Search by innovation and iteration, and that Google's search team has nothing to do with Android per se, but you might see how Apple people feel about the business empires built on stealing their ideas.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#109Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one's stealing Google's code. Here, it means 'we have evidence, given to us by our users who agreed to share their web traffic with us, that showing this result for this query is a great idea -- so let's do that.' People obtain data on their competitors' performance all the time and tailor their products accordingly. It's not theft, it's competitive intelligence.
> People obtain data on their competitors' performance all the time and tailor their products accordingly. It's not theft, it's competitive intelligence. Yes, but in this case, its more like claiming competitors product (the search result), as your own in your product directly. I would consider it a theft.
No it's not. That's absurd. A clicked search result is a successful product. Bing is taking note of a competitors successful product and using that information in it's own decisions on the products (serps) it produces for it's users.
This is a bunch of microsoft haters making hay over nothing at all. Quit whining. It's not theft, it's not any more privacy-offensive than anything Google does, get over it.