It pains me to say it but... that's genius.
Andy Baio says it, it's ok. I say it and I get down voted.
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
231–240 of 288 posts
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
are you claiming that google never scrapes bing search results pages? or any other search result pages?
poacher69, we crawl the public web. Anyone that blocks us out with robots.txt, we won't crawl. If you check bing.com/robots.txt, it has "Disallow: /search" . So no, we won't crawl Bing's search results pages. If anything, users tend to complain when search results from Lycos or wherever show up in Google.
http://www.bing.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Funny thing: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abing.com%2Fsearch%2F
I was gonna call out Matt for crawling bing's search results but I'm guessing Microsoft hasn't realized they return results from the /Search/ folder. ;)
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#233Hmmm. Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. But what Bing does is when you use its toolbar, it watches what you do and uses that information to rank results. Is that really copying? It showed Google's Honeypot page because Google's engineers were clicking on the Honeypot page with the toolbar installed. That isn't copying Google's resul…
Here's an easy test. Test with the Bing toolbar installed but with Bing and some other search engine (blekko, whatever).
This should help establish if it's the toolbar that is sniffing.
If so, while it may be questionable behavior, Bing would not be copying Google's results.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's embarrassing to point out that Microsoft is playing dirty. They played dirty with Netscape/IE in the 90s and look what happened.
They have a very long history of playing dirty. Lotus learned it, MS took information Lotus shared with them and then shared it with Excel and Office and they supposedly kept Lotus on an API changing treadmill. Digital Research learned it, MS wrote code that made Windows 3.x crash if it detected DR-DOS. Netscape learned it. Arguably, IBM(OS/2) and any other operating system vendor learned it in the 1990s as well, MS…
Also there's the strange fact that Bing and their whole online division makes gigantic losses. They're not in it for the money, they're in it to stifle competition and hold back progress so they can milk their cashcow some more.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt Cutts from Google and Rich Skrenta from Blekko are also speaking at that event (not to mention Peter Thiel, Esther Dyson, and Malcolm Gladwell). It's an industry event that happens to be sponsored by Bing, it's not really an MS event though.
Still, a TechCrunch & BusinessWeek contributor that gets paid by Bing is interesting.
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Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Err, by that line of thinking, Google leveraged Linux (the hard work of volunteers) to earn tens of billions and does not release the modified code for use of the volunteers. Of course they are not required to, but it isn't fair to Linux developers who have worked their butts off to develop Linux.
I strongly disagree, it's not the same analogy. Linux developers explicit say you can use the code for free. It's more like Linus say you can't use the code, but Google use them anyway. Btw, Google contributed a lot to open source projects.
>It's more like Linus say you can't use the code, but Google use them anyway.
By installing the Bing Toolbar, users are giving permission to track their clicks. If Bing's server farm is searching Google and parsing the results then it is more like your example.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt Cutts from Google and Rich Skrenta from Blekko are also speaking at that event (not to mention Peter Thiel, Esther Dyson, and Malcolm Gladwell). It's an industry event that happens to be sponsored by Bing, it's not really an MS event though.
Still, a TechCrunch & BusinessWeek contributor that gets paid by Bing is interesting.
and techcrunch has long been hosting google ads. so.... what?
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so I don't believe Bing has been able to crawl our search results directly Isn't compliance with robots.txt more of a voluntary thing? I'm not accusing MS of ignoring it when convenient, but if you/we/someone is accusing them of acting unethically wrt search results in the first place, telling the crawler to ignore robots.txt wouldn't be that far away, would it? (And likewise faking the user-agent, etc.) For better…
I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it there is some precedent in the US of intentionally ignoring robots.txt being unauthorized computer access, exposing you to all the liability that entails (possibly criminal).
I'd like to see an actual case reference for this. I've never heard of ignoring robots.txt resulting in any kind of legal action.
It would take a pretty big leap to go from robots.txt is advisory to ignoring it constitutes a criminal action.
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#239> For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term
If that's accurate, that's a precedent I'd rather not have seen.
(a little help on the grammar here, anyone?)
Re: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
#240Google are really getting pathetic.