Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no?
Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.
You are misunderstanding the word, 'Copy'. Here, it does not mean like "3-D movies is a great idea, lets copy it from avatar". Its more on the lines on "This code is great, lets copy it".
Copy == getting inspired by brilliance of an idea and implement on your own in the first case.
Copy == stealing in the latter case.
Copying (Ctrl C+ Ctrl V), google search results is theft, not "getting inspired" from previous body of works.
Here, it means 'we have evidence, given to us by our users who agreed to share their web traffic with us, that showing this result for this query is a great idea -- so let's do that.'
People obtain data on their competitors' performance all the time and tailor their products accordingly. It's not theft, it's competitive intelligence.
> People obtain data on their competitors' performance all the time and tailor their products accordingly. It's not theft, it's competitive intelligence.
Yes, but in this case, its more like claiming competitors product (the search result), as your own in your product directly. I would consider it a theft.
No it's not. That's absurd. A clicked search result is a successful product. Bing is taking note of a competitors successful product and using that information in it's own decisions on the products (serps) it produces for it's users.
This is a bunch of microsoft haters making hay over nothing at all. Quit whining. It's not theft, it's not any more privacy-offensive than anything Google does, get over it.
I agree with you 100% if that's the case, ( and matt Cutts ' comment suggests it is) . My argument were for the case if Bing were to crawl google results page, (programming equivalent of Searching on google and feeding results on own db as results for the term ), not considering user clicked information.
Except the algorithms are not really different. one algorithm is just a wrapper over the second algorithm. the crux of the matter is really in just second algo.
It's not a wrapper. Bing isn't passing requests to the Google API and then returning the results on the Bing page. Keep in mind that 93/100 of the seeds Google injected into Bing's database were filtered out.
Or:
"3-d movies are a great idea, lets take scenes from Avatar and put them in our movie" I don't think excessive simplification lends justice to the issue. Just like how piracy isn't necessarily theft, what Bing is doing isn't necessarily copying.
Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.