Setting aside the ethical questions, because I don't really care, when I look at the probable outcomes of this, I think it's wise for Google to point out what's going on here. This string of stories positions Google as the smart, sciency search engine, and Bing as a collection of hacks. This is how I'd want the public to perceive the battle if I were Google.
But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally.
As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.
Especially in the case of spelling correction, it is not so much that Google has "solved hard problems" to get the long-tail right, as that they have a monopoly on the relevant data. Unlike all their competitors, Google has 12 years of the entire history of queries and clicks to mine for signals about how to rewrite queries. Even if you have all of Google's algorithms, it is technologically impossible to build a better query rewriter, because you don't have their data. You can't buy this data short of buying Google, and if you believe Peter Norvig, it's an irreplaceable component of Google's quality advantage.
Microsoft, and any other would-be competitor, would essentially be committing suicide not to try to make up this data gap. If their toolbar is opt-in on the part of users, and you agree with me that my click history is mine to share with Microsoft if I so choose, this is helping consumers. Without some of this data, building a viable competitor to Google is impossible, and consumers do benefit from competition in web search.
Disclaimer: I work in Facebook search. Not the same thing as web search, and I don't really care whether Bing or Google "wins", though I'm temporarily rooting for Bing because as a user I want better, more competitive web search.
They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade).
I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win.
ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to:
Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization....
ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
Sciency? Their experiment appears to lack a control of any kind. They only use a Google search page as the source for the links, one that is specially engineered to return specific results for a specific term. Then they count the coincidences to support the conclusion that Bing is stealing search results from Google. Where is the non-Google page of links? Where is the comparison using links from a specially crafted bookmarks file? What is the margin of error? Where are the plausible alternative explanations? If this had been a science experiment, it would have been scoffed at for its narrow scope and predetermined outcome.
In discussions of this, I'm always surprised that people forget that Microsoft has had the axe of anti-trust litigation looming over it's head for years. They haven't been able to compete aggressively on a number of fronts, because they could easily be seen as anti-competitive, and end back in the courts.
But, now, search is a market where they are clearly the underdog. And, Microsoft finally has an arena they can step into and fight bare bloody knuckled without arousing anti-trust eyebrows in the US or EU governments.
And, Bing is competing rather well. Bing launched 18 months ago, and they now have 30% of the total search market (Yes, the bought a good bit of that through Yahoo). And, they are finally presenting a viable competitor to Google in general web search, which I believe is good for all.
Not only that, but in a number of search verticals, IMHO Bing's technology is quite a bit better than Google's (image search, video search and travel search).
I think Google has a reason to be scared and start throwing punches. Microsoft has a much more diverse revenue stream, and they can afford to lose money on search for years without breaking a sweat. Google primarily has a single source of revenue: search advertising. It'll be interesting to see how Google reacts when it's back is against the wall fighting for it's only revenue stream.
I agree with the OP. This is going to be a fun fight to watch.
Playing PR games (even if you win) may make you look good at the moment but has a tendency to spiral into more PR games instead of a better product.
Also, as stated on the earlier HN thread on this topic, it isn't at all clear that Google will come out on top. Many users suggested that the Google toolbar collected data on the sites people visited and if the Bing toolbar does also -- well is that really a game Google wants to play? Bing could come out a net winner given the increased attention on their search engine.
Why does this last aspect matter? It is an acknowledgment that Google is taking their competition seriously, which indicates a bit of uncertainty with respect to their own product. The more that goes into this (esp. if Bing hits back w/ info on how Google historically has mined data with their own toolbar) the more that Google has to lose and Microsoft has to win.
As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing."
I do buy that argument but only for mass media PR type stuff. The market leader can only give attention and raise awareness to the followers.
The thing is in this case, it's a technical blog posting and really anyone following that already knows about Bing. It was in searchengineland. If they had a link to it on their home page it would be a different story.
The result of this PR move does not decrease my opinion of Microsoft as a company, or Bing as a product. I held them both in fairly low regard already.
The result of all this is that I now perceive Bing to be considered more of a contender by Google than I previously did.
I doubt that is what Google intended. But then, this PR move was probably meant to change the opinion of people who had a higher opinion of Microsoft and Bing than myself, or were just casual users with no real position.
Either way, it does put Microsoft on the defense for something that I wouldn't construe as malicious.
Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service.
With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page.
Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.
I doubt the debate would get this nuanced, but I believe Google only tracks users on their own site. It appears Microsoft is tracking click across at least one search engine.
I think this distinction has legal as well as technical implications.
The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovations of Apple. They organized with Apple's competitors to provide an offering extremely similar in spirit and often in form to what the iDevices do. There is zero chance Android adopts all the "conventions" it has without copying Apple. The world was not on a fast track to full phone, bright screen, touch capacitive displays and gestures and app markets before Apple pioneered them. iPhone was not the logical inevitable implication of the technology that had gone before. If Google thinks Bing is not playing fair, Google has 10x as much to answer for in real damages to Apple for thieving their innovation.
Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google.
Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.
Which is not to say that Apple hasn't contributed ideas to Android, but just an indication that some people were thinking about good mobile devices before Jobs came out with the iPhone (which, by the way, is a bright, colorful, phone-calling PDA, not all that different in principle from late Palm Pilots/Treos).
The relevant analogy to phones would be if the Windows Phone team took all of Android's source code--and somehow decompiled the proprietary bits--changed the branding, and distributed it as their product.
There's a huge difference between doing work that is influenced by someone else and just stealing someone else's work.
The degree to which Microsoft is copying Google is to a much higher degree. Google did not do an exact "copy/paste" like Microsoft did here. At least Google did it from scratch.
There's an "all's fair in love and war" point you have here that carries some water, but there's a difference between reimplementing ideas and literally reading the output of your competitor and using that in your algorithm.
Here's an alternative hypothesis: the bing toolbar might look for explicit search queries (either strings entered into a textbox, or q=, query= parameters), and navigation from such pages to external domains. This would match all "search engines" in the most relaxed meaning of the term: product search, thesaurus, lexicons, dictionaries, everything; and I'd argue to be a legit signal for a "general search engine" to match.
(Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first.)
If this is the case, Google isn't being picked upon; rather, they are merely the first, who figured this out externally. Cookie for the scientific rigor, but no cigar for the way they PRd the story. Correlation, after all, does not equal causation.
"Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first."
Google does not use Google Analytics data in any way in our rankings. I've said that plenty of times before, but it's worth mentioning.
Well, while doing this they clearly knew that Google is by far the biggest search engine in the world, and naturally most of the data would be coming directly from Google. Right?
I'm guessing they're only looking at the Referrer field, and they're doing it across the board. (For me, Google's result pages all point back to Google, so they can leak this info via the Referrer field.)
I'd also guess that the data from domain specific sites are more valuable than generic search sites. (User selects appropriate site, does search, selects appropriate result.)
>Suffice to say, Google’s pretty unhappy with the whole situation, which does raise a number of issues. For one, is what Bing seems to be doing illegal? Singhal was “hesitant” to say that since Google technically hasn’t lost anything. It still has its own results, even if it feels Bing is mimicking them
This is actually just IE's "spying" working properly. If an MSIE user that has allowed Microsoft to see their browsing habits follows a link after a search then MS are associating that link. This is sensible as it's measuring actual visits following a given search.
If someone searches for a googlewhack and Bing have no results for that term then it's natural that MS would then use this data to associate the googlewhack with the visited page.
Initially I thought this sounded like MS being underhand but really they're tracking their users and associating their users search terms with the pages that they visit - _not_ using this data for search (given they have permission) would be silly, no?
The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??
The number-one point I take away from this isn't about ethics or what is "right".
It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.
They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.
That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.
Will any Bing users suddenly switch to Google because of this? Probably not. Will people who've never heard of Bing be reading about them in the paper tomorrow? Yes. Will complaining about competition from underdogs make Google look bad to some? Yes.
I don't see how making this a public issue is a win for Google. Seems like something they should have kept in their back pocket. "Keep your enemies closer", as they say.
Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.'
Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this.
I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing).
As many others have said, I don't think that using click data from the browser/toolbar as one of thousands signals can be considered "copying". When doing a query with a nonexistent word, all the other signals are zero because there is no knowledge about the query, so the only remaining one is the history of clicks "sniffed" from Google/etc... SERP. OTOH, on real world queries the signal has probably a relatively low weight.
I don't think that it is a secret that Bing uses click data from browser/toolbar as a signal, it's just a not well known fact. For example in the paper "Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data" (http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf) by Microsoft Research, they explain how to improve the spelling corrections by using click data from "other search engines".
Google Analytics knows that the search term 'autodesk revit devlopers guide' on Bing lead someone to my blog. I take it this information is in the HTTP header on the request to my site which the Google analytics code reads.
If Google were to use Google analytics information in their search results, how would that be any different to what Bing is doing? Or is the distinction that Google claims not to do this?
"[Google] Search Quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking ... You can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won't affect your ranking within Google Search results." It's dated middle of last year, I guess it's possible that something has changed, but nothing I'm aware of.
We don't use Google Analytics data in any way in our search rankings. The reason is that we wouldn't want a site's rankings to benefit just because they chose to use Google Analytics.
Isn't it bad form from a marketing perspective to continually mention their top competitor? Does Apple mention android so extensively in their press?
As Paul said, customers don't care. All they are doing is giving Bing some front and center advertising on it's blog (which has several non-tech readers) and the tech people who actually care probably don't enough to actually switch search engines.
Google didn't fire right off the bat with the hard-hitting blog entry, but instead basically gave a more detailed version of the same thing to Danny Sullivan. They wanted to see how Microsoft would react before going official with it, because even though Microsoft's response was predictable, there's always a chance that Microsoft would have surprised everyone with their response. (They didn't, in my opinion.)
What's struck me most about this story as it has developed throughout the day is that Google's actions are very deliberate and planned.
I wouldn't consider Google as continually mentioning Bing, either; in fact, I don't think they've paid much attention at all to them. Put Bing in the search box on their official blog, and you'll see that this is the only post specifically about Bing -- a perusal of older posts indicates that the rest are hitting on comments or TrackBacks (i.e., the background image misfeature).
I think that customers do care a lot of the time. Especially customers of tech companies, who often become evangelists for their chosen platforms and devices.
In this case, I don't know how this discussion (verging on disagreement) could occur without mentioning the competition.
If they mentioned bing in a super bowl commercial I'd agree with you but this is a tech blog. I believe there's a difference in the marketing results between the two.
Google should be more careful here: either it's OK to repurpose other site's content or it's not, and Google has built their entire business around repurposing content. They shouldn't be surprised when their competitors start doing the same.
I think they (google) can really only cry foul if there is specific code in the Bing toolbar that targets google's search results.
The way that they describe the approach, it seems like the Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo, altavista, ask.com and many others.
Google developed an impressive spell correction and error detection algorithm to improve their search results.
Microsoft inadvertently benefits from Google's research by simply watching and recording how people use Google. The end result is a Microsoft product that isn't as good as its competition, but it's good enough for some people. Sound familiar?
It's a classic case of true innovation vs. "Microsoft" innovation.
I think this is silly. Unless Google can come up with a copyright claim on its search results, and I seriously doubt they can, they have nothing to complain about. I use Google's search results too -- information you pump out publicly can be used to the advantage of your customers as well as your competitors. If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them. Accept that freely available information is freely available or clamp down and stop publishing information that might help your competitors. In Google's case, unfortunately, the info that helps Bing is also the info that is essential to Google's customers.
I know of some other media companies that are hyper-paranoid about their mass produced, widely disseminated, public content being "stolen" by others, maybe Google should set up a lunch date with the RIAA.
It's an appeal to the average person's "fair play" instinct.
I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't do something like this, but it seems very effective. They have a perfect narrative for people to wrap their heads around, and even if nothing illegal was done, it still feels like Microsoft is doing something "wrong".
Your argument is seriously flawed. Just because something is made publicly available doesn't mean it's free and clear for anyone to reproduce.
For example, if I don't chain my bike it doesn't mean anyone is allowed to steal it. Taking my bike is still a crime. How I protected it has nothing to do with the criminal act.
> If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them.
Why do people think there's anything wrong here? Here's a (hypothetical) similar example:
In the 1990s, it probably look a lot of iterations, user studies, and market research to decide that copy/paste, undo, etc were the "right" set of features to include in a word processor. Do you think Google Docs re-did all that research? No, of course not. They probably just looked at Word and said, "we need to support these features". And there's nothing wrong with that. This is the exact same thing.
If you have a product out in the market, it's fair game for your competitors to look at and analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and use those to improve it's own product.
This is an excellent short term PR tactic, but Microsoft can just say that they're not copying Google's results, they're just using user click data to improve their search results and that sometimes that click data happens to come from users' google searches.
It's understandable why Google's concerned, because it's likely that Microsoft has access to a lot more this data due to their OS and software's ubiquity.
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|15 years ago|reply
But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally.
As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.
[+] [-] kmavm|15 years ago|reply
Microsoft, and any other would-be competitor, would essentially be committing suicide not to try to make up this data gap. If their toolbar is opt-in on the part of users, and you agree with me that my click history is mine to share with Microsoft if I so choose, this is helping consumers. Without some of this data, building a viable competitor to Google is impossible, and consumers do benefit from competition in web search.
Disclaimer: I work in Facebook search. Not the same thing as web search, and I don't really care whether Bing or Google "wins", though I'm temporarily rooting for Bing because as a user I want better, more competitive web search.
[+] [-] tmsh|15 years ago|reply
They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade).
I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win.
ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization....
ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
[+] [-] qjz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamelgringo|15 years ago|reply
In discussions of this, I'm always surprised that people forget that Microsoft has had the axe of anti-trust litigation looming over it's head for years. They haven't been able to compete aggressively on a number of fronts, because they could easily be seen as anti-competitive, and end back in the courts.
But, now, search is a market where they are clearly the underdog. And, Microsoft finally has an arena they can step into and fight bare bloody knuckled without arousing anti-trust eyebrows in the US or EU governments.
And, Bing is competing rather well. Bing launched 18 months ago, and they now have 30% of the total search market (Yes, the bought a good bit of that through Yahoo). And, they are finally presenting a viable competitor to Google in general web search, which I believe is good for all.
Not only that, but in a number of search verticals, IMHO Bing's technology is quite a bit better than Google's (image search, video search and travel search).
I think Google has a reason to be scared and start throwing punches. Microsoft has a much more diverse revenue stream, and they can afford to lose money on search for years without breaking a sweat. Google primarily has a single source of revenue: search advertising. It'll be interesting to see how Google reacts when it's back is against the wall fighting for it's only revenue stream.
I agree with the OP. This is going to be a fun fight to watch.
[+] [-] Jd|15 years ago|reply
Also, as stated on the earlier HN thread on this topic, it isn't at all clear that Google will come out on top. Many users suggested that the Google toolbar collected data on the sites people visited and if the Bing toolbar does also -- well is that really a game Google wants to play? Bing could come out a net winner given the increased attention on their search engine.
Why does this last aspect matter? It is an acknowledgment that Google is taking their competition seriously, which indicates a bit of uncertainty with respect to their own product. The more that goes into this (esp. if Bing hits back w/ info on how Google historically has mined data with their own toolbar) the more that Google has to lose and Microsoft has to win.
[+] [-] po|15 years ago|reply
I do buy that argument but only for mass media PR type stuff. The market leader can only give attention and raise awareness to the followers.
The thing is in this case, it's a technical blog posting and really anyone following that already knows about Bing. It was in searchengineland. If they had a link to it on their home page it would be a different story.
[+] [-] tony_landis|15 years ago|reply
The result of all this is that I now perceive Bing to be considered more of a contender by Google than I previously did.
I doubt that is what Google intended. But then, this PR move was probably meant to change the opinion of people who had a higher opinion of Microsoft and Bing than myself, or were just casual users with no real position.
Either way, it does put Microsoft on the defense for something that I wouldn't construe as malicious.
[+] [-] seanalltogether|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidu|15 years ago|reply
1) They do the same thing. When I have the google toolbar installed and use bing, my clickstream data goes to Google.
2) On a micro level, there is nothing wrong with this at all.
Of course, on a macro level, both sites trample all over user privacy, so you should be using DDG.
[+] [-] nikster|15 years ago|reply
Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service.
With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page.
Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.
[+] [-] noahc|15 years ago|reply
I think this distinction has legal as well as technical implications.
[+] [-] barista|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ellyagg|15 years ago|reply
Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google.
Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
Which is not to say that Apple hasn't contributed ideas to Android, but just an indication that some people were thinking about good mobile devices before Jobs came out with the iPhone (which, by the way, is a bright, colorful, phone-calling PDA, not all that different in principle from late Palm Pilots/Treos).
[+] [-] Tiomaidh|15 years ago|reply
There's a huge difference between doing work that is influenced by someone else and just stealing someone else's work.
[+] [-] henryw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemiller|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdrinf|15 years ago|reply
(Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first.)
If this is the case, Google isn't being picked upon; rather, they are merely the first, who figured this out externally. Cookie for the scientific rigor, but no cigar for the way they PRd the story. Correlation, after all, does not equal causation.
[+] [-] Matt_Cutts|15 years ago|reply
Google does not use Google Analytics data in any way in our rankings. I've said that plenty of times before, but it's worth mentioning.
[+] [-] mda|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunham|15 years ago|reply
I'd also guess that the data from domain specific sites are more valuable than generic search sites. (User selects appropriate site, does search, selects appropriate result.)
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|15 years ago|reply
>Suffice to say, Google’s pretty unhappy with the whole situation, which does raise a number of issues. For one, is what Bing seems to be doing illegal? Singhal was “hesitant” to say that since Google technically hasn’t lost anything. It still has its own results, even if it feels Bing is mimicking them
This is actually just IE's "spying" working properly. If an MSIE user that has allowed Microsoft to see their browsing habits follows a link after a search then MS are associating that link. This is sensible as it's measuring actual visits following a given search.
If someone searches for a googlewhack and Bing have no results for that term then it's natural that MS would then use this data to associate the googlewhack with the visited page.
Initially I thought this sounded like MS being underhand but really they're tracking their users and associating their users search terms with the pages that they visit - _not_ using this data for search (given they have permission) would be silly, no?
The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??
[+] [-] neild|15 years ago|reply
It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.
They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.
That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.
[+] [-] chaosmachine|15 years ago|reply
I don't see how making this a public issue is a win for Google. Seems like something they should have kept in their back pocket. "Keep your enemies closer", as they say.
[+] [-] tristanperry|15 years ago|reply
Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.'
Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this.
I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing).
So yeah: good for Google. Bad for Bing.
[+] [-] ot|15 years ago|reply
I don't think that it is a secret that Bing uses click data from browser/toolbar as a signal, it's just a not well known fact. For example in the paper "Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data" (http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf) by Microsoft Research, they explain how to improve the spelling corrections by using click data from "other search engines".
[+] [-] rodh257|15 years ago|reply
Google Analytics knows that the search term 'autodesk revit devlopers guide' on Bing lead someone to my blog. I take it this information is in the HTTP header on the request to my site which the Google analytics code reads.
If Google were to use Google analytics information in their search results, how would that be any different to what Bing is doing? Or is the distinction that Google claims not to do this?
[+] [-] gregable|15 years ago|reply
"[Google] Search Quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking ... You can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won't affect your ranking within Google Search results." It's dated middle of last year, I guess it's possible that something has changed, but nothing I'm aware of.
[+] [-] joevandyk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matt_Cutts|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c2|15 years ago|reply
As Paul said, customers don't care. All they are doing is giving Bing some front and center advertising on it's blog (which has several non-tech readers) and the tech people who actually care probably don't enough to actually switch search engines.
[+] [-] jedsmith|15 years ago|reply
Google didn't fire right off the bat with the hard-hitting blog entry, but instead basically gave a more detailed version of the same thing to Danny Sullivan. They wanted to see how Microsoft would react before going official with it, because even though Microsoft's response was predictable, there's always a chance that Microsoft would have surprised everyone with their response. (They didn't, in my opinion.)
What's struck me most about this story as it has developed throughout the day is that Google's actions are very deliberate and planned.
I wouldn't consider Google as continually mentioning Bing, either; in fact, I don't think they've paid much attention at all to them. Put Bing in the search box on their official blog, and you'll see that this is the only post specifically about Bing -- a perusal of older posts indicates that the rest are hitting on comments or TrackBacks (i.e., the background image misfeature).
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
In this case, I don't know how this discussion (verging on disagreement) could occur without mentioning the competition.
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecopoesis|15 years ago|reply
Google should be more careful here: either it's OK to repurpose other site's content or it's not, and Google has built their entire business around repurposing content. They shouldn't be surprised when their competitors start doing the same.
[+] [-] droz|15 years ago|reply
The way that they describe the approach, it seems like the Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo, altavista, ask.com and many others.
[+] [-] mishmash|15 years ago|reply
Isn't Yahoo search powered by Bing anyway?
[+] [-] jeroen|15 years ago|reply
"Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites."
“We do not copy Google’s results.”
I see MS denying _copying_, not denying _using_ Google search results. That makes the title of the Google blog post incorrect.
[+] [-] thought_alarm|15 years ago|reply
Microsoft inadvertently benefits from Google's research by simply watching and recording how people use Google. The end result is a Microsoft product that isn't as good as its competition, but it's good enough for some people. Sound familiar?
It's a classic case of true innovation vs. "Microsoft" innovation.
[+] [-] atularora|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
I know of some other media companies that are hyper-paranoid about their mass produced, widely disseminated, public content being "stolen" by others, maybe Google should set up a lunch date with the RIAA.
[+] [-] MikeCapone|15 years ago|reply
I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't do something like this, but it seems very effective. They have a perfect narrative for people to wrap their heads around, and even if nothing illegal was done, it still feels like Microsoft is doing something "wrong".
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|15 years ago|reply
For example, if I don't chain my bike it doesn't mean anyone is allowed to steal it. Taking my bike is still a crime. How I protected it has nothing to do with the criminal act.
[+] [-] jedsmith|15 years ago|reply
I'm curious how you'd implement that idea.
[+] [-] neutronicus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aneesh|15 years ago|reply
In the 1990s, it probably look a lot of iterations, user studies, and market research to decide that copy/paste, undo, etc were the "right" set of features to include in a word processor. Do you think Google Docs re-did all that research? No, of course not. They probably just looked at Word and said, "we need to support these features". And there's nothing wrong with that. This is the exact same thing.
If you have a product out in the market, it's fair game for your competitors to look at and analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and use those to improve it's own product.
[+] [-] radicaldreamer|15 years ago|reply
It's understandable why Google's concerned, because it's likely that Microsoft has access to a lot more this data due to their OS and software's ubiquity.
[+] [-] callmevlad|15 years ago|reply
"Why are we getting so much traffic from people searching for 'delhipublicschool40 chdjob'?"
[+] [-] juddlyon|15 years ago|reply
"Is hiybbprqag some new band the kids like? Why don't we have tickets for them?"