It's embarrassing for Google to complain about this. You FINALLY get a little competition on your turf and you try to make some big issue that, as a market leader, the product you produce is being watched, analyzed and in some ways incorporated by your competitor.
There is no victim here. They are not taking your 1st result and copying it. They are taking the result the user clicked. Obviously you didn't predict that with your algorithm or you'd have always made that the 1st result. Instead, what they're tracking is user behavior, not your raw ranking.
Obviously users give Google implicit permission to track their behavior by using your product. And similarly, by installing the Bing toolbar, they're giving Bing that permission.
In short, Bing Toolbar infers relationship between words on the page and the next page the user clicks on. Google's team purposefully confined Bing Toolbar behavior-tracking algorithm to their use of google.com search result page, and then cried fool about "bing stealing Google's search results".
This is disgraceful attention-whoring on Google's part. Quite surprising, too, as I don't remember them ever stooping that low.
They may just be using terms in the referring URL rather than the referring page. It'd probably yield better data. Most site-specific search pages would have the search term in the URL.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're more interested in data from domain-specific sites like epicurious than generic search sites like Google.
I'd also guess that this won't work once the SEO guys figure out they can feed fake clickstreams to MS.
Referring URL? Oh right, Google intercepts all search result clicks through a redirector, and includes the search term in the intercepting URL. Yeah, the unique words in that URL could figure into describing the content of the final destination page (after redirect), the same way anchor text figures as well.
Even Matt's allegation is softened by "I believe" here: there appears to be nothing that conclusively indicates Bing is solely targeting Google. For example, the observed behaviour could be a side-effect of a generic algorithm to extract and associate search queries with a user's click stream, which is only a minor variant of what Google itself does with its own toolbar.
If the case described above were true, then all Google has done here is to make inconclusive accusations and use the occasion to highlight its own dominance over search.
It seems to me this is just a cheap and slightly seedy PR stunt.
Associating search queries and click stream behaviour is fine if it's your own search engine. Doing it for someone else's search engine isn't (regardless of who's doing it).
In the hypothetical situation above, it has almost nothing to do with the search engine - it is both the user providing the query and selecting the result: this is the data of value, not which intermediary provided the list of results to select from.
Really? Doesn't the intermediary that narrowed the list from several billion possible matches to the best 10, including correcting the inherent spelling errors in the query carry some value?
> Associating search queries and click stream behaviour is fine if it's your own search engine. Doing it for someone else's search engine isn't (regardless of who's doing it).
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 charged premiums if hardware vendors wanted to install non-Windows operating systems. They sort of tried to do it to Intuit, they made a competitor and then effectively gave it away for free. Enough so that a lot of folks avoid Mono like it's, well, actually mono. They've established that reputation, and most of the time, by the time it became clear what was going on, MS had already done irreparable damage.
It is kind of embarrassing for Google, but if it is real and it continues, it's better to address it now rather than after MS becomes a titan of search and Google's market has eroded. At times, it seems like MS has changed in ways, but fundamentally they're still run by the same guys. Remember that when you play your Xbox or use Bing or any MS products, they don't like to see other successful software companies.
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.
I think they are complaining because it could be far more widespread: it would actually be easier for the head than the long tail. Where it‘s harder is for News, and Bing appears to lag for recent results.
I remember that when Bing went out, everyone was wondering how close to Google the results were (and talked about it as a good thing).
If it's beneath Google to complain about Microsoft riding on its coattails for the highly valuable "long tail" of queries, surely it's beneath Microsoft to sue Android manufacturers for competing in the smartphone space?
Would it have been better if Google had jumped straight to the questionable lawsuit part, like every other company seems to do when threatened on its own turf?
Let me try to understand what happened. For some obscure searches that return no results normally, a handful of users searched on Google using IE's toolbar and then clicked on bogus results.
Those bogus results made it to Bing's results eventually.
Ok... So it proves Microsoft analyzes the toolbar behavior and when it has no other data, it will therefore look like a copy of Google search.
Sounds fair to me. Do you want to get into a discussion on how exactly Google tracks you online?
in 7-9% of the times google tried to spam bing. not in 7-9% of search results. this indicates that maybe google isn't that great at figuring out how to spam bing or that bing is pretty good at defending agains spam. maybe google could take some lessons from bing on cleaning up spam and problem that seems all to prevelant on google these days.
There is, however, the legitimate complaint that they apparently do not finally have a little competition on their turf. Their competition is cheating, not innovating. That helps who, how? At best for "competition" sakes, Bing nabs a big share of the market; now there are two big dogs who make it hard to enter into the search realm with new ideas.
As we all know, this isn't the first time Microsoft has copied someone else. And I'm sure it won't be the last.
I think Google has a right to complain. Microsoft has resorted to these less than innovative tactics to monopolize themselves for a long time now, and it isn't fair to companies like Google who have worked their butts off (and gave 1.8 million shares - $336M in 2005 - to Stanford for the PageRank algorithm) to develop their superior product.
You clearly didn't read the whole article. If you did, you clearly didn't understand the article. Step back a little bit, fanboy. Microsoft wasn't copying anyone here.
Oh I definitely did read it in its entirety and understood it perfectly. What you're failing to do is see the whole picture.
Let's put it this way... if Google hadn't bought the PageRank algorithm from Stanford and put years of work into perfecting their search results, Microsoft wouldn't have any way to track which Google search results users click. It's an unfair tactic that clearly demonstrates Microsoft's sketchiness and desire to monopolize themselves (by any means necessary, "evil" or not) wherever there's a computer.
As for the fanboy comment... I'm certainly not a fanboy but I'll let the following speak for itself: Microsoft Internet Explorer vs Google Chrome
All your comments are coming from your assumption that Microsoft is trying to monopolize in something - in this case, search. Hence, your comments (although you will disagree) are biased and irrational. Microsoft isn't trying to monopolize in anything nowadays. In fact, they can't, so they aren't even trying.
From a search engine user's point of view, I believe this whole fiasco is ridiculous. First, it's ridiculous because Google is handling this situation very immaturely. Matt Cutts should not have confronted the VP of Bing in a way he did. Second, if I were the user of the Bing Toolbar, I gave permission to the Bing Toolbar to use my behaviors to polish my search results. I have no problem with that. Lastly, the experiments they did has more to do with "guessing what user wanted" than "what PageRank does".
I've used Bing fairly often past 6 months because of too many spams Google search results were giving back. Now that Google has fixed (or still working on) the spam problem, I'm starting to use Google again. However, what I noticed from the past 6 months is that Google search isn't so much better than Bing. This Bing Toolbar fiasco only applies to synthetic queries that I would never make.
Is Bing cheating? I don't think so. To me, they are just using another signal from user's permission. However, the definition of cheating will be different for everyone else.
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.
>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.
They employ Andrew Morton and Ted T'so, and have been working pretty hard to get the delta between their custom Linux and upstream down- I'd say they've been pretty fair to Linux developers.
There is no victim here. They are not taking your 1st result and copying it. They are taking the result the user clicked. Obviously you didn't predict that with your algorithm or you'd have always made that the 1st result. Instead, what they're tracking is user behavior, not your raw ranking.
Obviously users give Google implicit permission to track their behavior by using your product. And similarly, by installing the Bing toolbar, they're giving Bing that permission.
This is beneath you Matt and it's beneath Google.