Bing Is Cheating, Copying Google Search Results 693
An anonymous reader writes "Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google's results, then uses that information to improve Bing's own search listings. Bing doesn't deny this."
Not that suprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't expect any mod points for this post... but I'll just say that I'm not surprised by this. Since the launch of Bing, I've kind of questioned how MSFT could have come up with a 'superior' search engine so quickly. Their second (at least) attempt since 2000.....
Re:Cheating? (Score:2, Interesting)
Close the loop? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now what happens if Google, to improve its search results, starts copying Bing as well? Is this feedback interconnection stable, or will it merely result in spurious noise being amplified, which commentators will misidentify as vast social movements?
Re:Cheating? (Score:5, Interesting)
“It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work,” said Singhal. “I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.”
Mountweazels (Score:5, Interesting)
Dictionary makers deliberately introduce "mountweazels", fake words designed to catch people violating their copyrights. Map makers use "copyright traps", fake streets.
Sounds like Google did this on a one-time basis, but it seems to me that they could make it permanent. If nothing else, finding the mountweazels could be fun.
They already have a few jokes interspersed, like "anagram" and "french military victories". I wonder if Bing shows unexpected results for those.
google instant vs duckduckgo (Score:5, Interesting)
People are not leaving Google because other search engines are getting better.
Rather, people are leaving because Google is getting worse and has lost focus of search simplicity.
Google instant drove me out.
If start typing and several pages fly by per second, this increases the garbage to information ratio, is inefficient, and disruptive. Often, the result is a blank page.
I switched to duckduckgo, as it simple, and the results are good.
Occasionally, I will use !g in the duckduckgo search to access google, but I try to avoid it.
Google should stop worrying about Bing, and look within.
Re:homework analogies aside (Score:2, Interesting)
The honeypot experiment in TFA shows that Bing improves its search results by monitoring user behaviour. It doesn't tie this _exclusively_ to Google. For all we know, Bing monitors all sorts of user actions across all sorts of web sites, including Google, and it uses these user actions as a hint about relevancy.
If this is so, then Bing is an admirable example of crowd-sourcing to improve search, not an evil theft from Google.
Google itself already uses user behaviour to improve relevance of search engine listing -- it monitors which search result you click on. Maybe Bing is just doing the same sort of thing across a wider data set, namely the user's entire behaviour. It would be entirely in keeping with Microsoft's style -- the way it uses instrumentation and telemetry to gather huge amounts of data about how people use Windows.
Re:Oblig Car Analogy (Score:2, Interesting)
"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."
As I have pointed out elsewhere in the thread. Google gamed the Bing toolbar by having their monitored users actually click on the these fake results! This could easily be attributed to Bing Toolbar monitoring user behavior, instead of Bing using ranking information from Google.
I have noticed that whoever brings up 'fanboi' is usually the real 'fanboi'. Perhaps that should be a new internet meme.
Bing does not deny this != Copies Google's results (Score:5, Interesting)
Most likely, Bing is acquiring clickthrough data from textbox input and pairing it with link click followthrough. That is, Bing watches what people type and what links they click after typing it. Did Google ever try other mechanisms to munge results, such as using an internal search page (i.e. one where it uses some proprietary engine to search, say, a forum) and see if Bing started reporting those results? If so, it would indicate that coming from Google had nothing to do with the mechanism of acquisition, and that it was strictly parsing URL or textbox entries combined with link clickthrough. Implying that Bing's response of "we use a lot of vectors" is the same as saying "we steal stuff from Google, so what" is trolltastic at best, and blatantly misleading at worst.
Re:Cheating? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The purpose of a search engine is to provide search results that match the user's desire for information. What Bing are doing is compatible with this purpose.
That doesn't mean its right, I'm just pointing out a couple of false analogies.
It does change the question of "what's the best search engine?" from Google vs Bing to Google (today) vs Google (last month)
Re:Cheating? (Score:5, Interesting)
I started to make a list of things I would to to build a boat and then I was asked what would I do if I was asked to have it faster by the customer. My reply was to look into what could wait to be installed later.
All this time I've been questioning what I answered wrong. And It seems clear now (yes, I didn't get into a second interview): The answer is "copy one", "buy one and disassemble it" or "buy one from the company and make it look like it's yours". Darn! I wish I knew this before my interview! I guess thanks go to Google.
Re:Cheating? No. Bad analogy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah! Everybody knows there's no such thing as cheating in business.
Silly rabbit! Ethics is for kids!
Of course there's ethics, and the ethical thing to do is to improve your offering to give the customers what they want. And since the search market is all aggregating third-party data to start with, I don't see why it should be 'wrong' to aggregate another aggregator's data. Don't we want an open Internet? How does calling meta-search 'cheating' make any more sense than calling pinging someone elses router 'theft'? Heck, in the before-time, there used to be entire search engines whose business model was *just* meta-search - anyone remember Dogpile?
Now, depending on your competitor to give you honest responses to your mechanical queries, that might be a weakness...