Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#131

Post by newt » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 11:29 AM UTC

ohashi wrote: post #109

newt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the effect is the same as intentional scraping and outright stealing The google engineers intentionally sent this click data to Bing, so is Bing really stealing? It's odd to act surprised when Bing uses the data that was intentionally sent to it. Bing could specifically ignore Google search results pages when it is tracking clicks, but is that legitimate? Google scrapes everything, why shouldn't Bing?

They were testing to see if it was true. Many users are doing it, bing is taking data for non-google engineers too.

The point of collecting click data is not to target google engineers, it is to collect data from masses of people doing regular searches and to improve them by seeing which links get clicked on, so obviously Bing is "taking data for non-google engineers". Furthermore, there's no indication that google search results pages are even distinguished from other pages in this.

In fact, the data that it takes from Google engineers for carefully engineered corner-case searches is the exception.

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#132

Post by nailer » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 3:28 PM UTC

Drewjw81 wrote: post #54

Drewjw81 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not to understand? Microsoft is colecting search phrases from searches people make though the IE search box. Then they are tying that data to the next page people click to after the search. Google intentionally polluted their data using odd phrases and asked users to click on their bogus results. Given that the only data bing would have for those strange phrases is polluted crap from Googlers it's not surprisi…

Since nailer's comment on my other post can't be directly replied to. From googles mouth http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... "We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bi…

> In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.

Thanks - that's what I've been getting at. This isn't data entry into the Bing toolbar, it's into a non-Bing page when one has the toolbar installed.

Re: Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

#133

Post by Encosia » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 4:34 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #130

Encosia wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. From the original article yesterday: This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.

No. There's a difference between having the toolbar installed but typing something into the google.com directly (which actually occurred) and typing something into the Bing toolbar.

Even if you exclusively use Google's web interface to search, the Bing toolbar gathers anonymous data about your browsing (if you've got that option enabled). It's fairly clear about that when you install it. To my knowledge, all of these search engine toolbars gather statistics on a broader scale than specifically what's typed into their search fields, Google's included.