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Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

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Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#91

Post by noibl »

I found the discussion video on that page fascinating, in how Harry Shum's take on the other topics echoed his defence of Bing on this issue.

On the copying: Bing has dramatically improved over recent history because we use lots of inputs and we would have preferred if Google had talked to us privately so we could figure out how to make this less obvious on the long tail.

On web spam: Google is the industry leader and needs to share more with us little guys so we can all work together to beat this.

On search quality: Google needs to disclose their quality metrics so the industry as a whole can understand what users want. Then we can all make search better for everyone.

I thought Cutts was very gracious in his responses despite looking incredulous at hearing some of this stuff.

Look, this "let's all get along and work together as an industry to fix problems for the user"... it's bullshit. Either compete fairly or don't, but don't pretend that Google owes you data so you can get a leg up.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#93

Post by pessimist »

kenjackson wrote: post #77
moultano wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should focus on trying to be innovative again, that was the Google I respected. I work in search quality at Google. I'm busting my ass every day working on fundamental reimaginings of how results get ranked. I'm going to keep doing that regardless of what bing does, because it makes the world a better place, and it's fun. But, suppose the stuff I'm working on works out, and tomorrow Google shows up with a whol…

Then after a few weeks of sniffing clicks, Bing comes up with the same set of revolutionary results, but they have no idea how they got there, they have no idea what the evidence is to rank them there, all they know is that people like those results on Google. But this whole "no idea how they got there" is kind of bogus. The whole notion of link analysis is to infer from a link that a page is important. Now they're i…

The click is stronger than the link, because MS is including the query associated with the click.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#94

Post by onecommentayear »

webwright wrote: post #31

"Copying" was a pretty brutal word to use-- not surprising that it raised MSFT's hackles a bit. MS clearly uses toolbar users' clickstreams (on and off Google) to improve their own search efforts. Google created an artificial scenario where the ONLY input was Google search behavior and lo, the search results are exactly the same. Whether or not that steps over a line (I don't feel that it does), it's not "copying" in…

Imagine I launch a search engine with no data. Then I feed it with urls IE users click on after their google search. I will eventually end up with an exact copy of google database. So I think that this technique can be called "copying". Now if Bing uses this technique for 0.1% of their data, then it can be said that 0.1% of their data are copied from Google database.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#95

Post by alain94040 »

That shows a lot of bad faith on the part of Matt Cutts. It has been explained to death, here and elsewhere, what most likely happened. The fact that he continues to make the same accusation... well frankly he lost a lot of credibility with me. One more manipulative corporate drone, one less genuine hacker.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#96

Post by MarkMc »

kenjackson wrote: post #84
haberman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My take on this is quite the opposite. If MS thinks they're doing nothing wrong, they shouldn't stop. They should do what is best for their customers. Does this mean anyone should feel free to ignore robots.txt if they think it will be better for their customers?

Web content layout and text owned by website. Opt out with robots.txt. Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar. Both should be respected.

"Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar."

It is not clear to me that the user completely owns the clickstream. If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#97

Post by kenjackson »

ddkrone wrote: post #79
kenjackson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google? Speed of innovation. It's not our job to make it easy for them to have diffentiation. I just want great results. The more parity we give them with respect to data, the harder they'll have work to innovate in order to differentiate. AFAICT, that benefits us the users.

I didn't suggest it should be our job to make it easy for them. I want great results too and I want it without ads and spam getting in the way as well. In fact there should be more tools integrated into browsers to allow the user to own their own click stream and browsing pattern data and "sell" it to the highest bidder. Do you know of such tools? I don't. We are even at the point both in terms of computational power…

I don't. It's too bad that the whole discussion happening is about "cheating" or not. And not about using everything available for better search.

It would be great to see the discussion change.

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#98

Post by kenjackson »

MarkMc wrote: post #96
kenjackson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web content layout and text owned by website. Opt out with robots.txt. Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar. Both should be respected.

"Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar." It is not clear to me that the user completely owns the clickstream. If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?

If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?

So if my dad calls with a question, and I search for the answer, I can't send him the link that I got from Google? Or do you mean something else?

Re: Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate

#100

Post by tygorius »

coderdude wrote: post #85
tygorius wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing is being parasitic to Google in this situation by generating no value for them. Well, perhaps Microsoft thinks its business involves providing value to their customers rather than its competitors. What seems consistently missing from the Google PR campaign has been how Microsoft's behavior is a bad thing for the user.

Google doesn't spend exorbitant amounts of money so that they can provide value to Bing's users. If Bing's users want value they can use Google instead.

Again you put the focus on Google. And again I ask, how is Microsoft's alleged behavior harming the user?

Bing's increasing market share is presumably already due to providing value. If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft", do you think that's going to make people less inclined to try Bing?

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