<quote>But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science...</quote>
Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science. The generation between keyword and website content/results is what a search engine is all about, and what Google does (arguably) well.
I believe why Google is crying foul is because it is the only reference to generate the mapping between the keywords they made up and the website results. Bing did not have these mappings until they evaluated user clickthroughs that went through Google's results, with their browsing history going something like :
1/ http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword
2/ http://website.com
Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keyword<=>http://website.com ; this is the shady part: if google did not generate its results, that mapping would never have taken place: the user would never have been able to tell Bing that there is relevance between the two unless Google existed.
>> Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science.
You're talking about all of the work needed to make a search engine good, I'm talking about the specific algorithm needed for that particular type of query (rare, obscure, easily misspelled word). Different scopes.
And again, my observation in that bullet point is that, imho, the "torsoraphy" type of query could have been improved by something like the "close enough to rare word? + does wiki page exist?" algorithm, rather than copying.
Re: recording click history being shady: I don't really see what's so fundamentally different between that and recording surfing habits via ads. It goes back to the first point: Google could say they don't use that data to improve SERP relevance, but we're going on faith on that claim.
Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science. The generation between keyword and website content/results is what a search engine is all about, and what Google does (arguably) well.
I believe why Google is crying foul is because it is the only reference to generate the mapping between the keywords they made up and the website results. Bing did not have these mappings until they evaluated user clickthroughs that went through Google's results, with their browsing history going something like : 1/ http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword 2/ http://website.com
Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keyword<=>http://website.com ; this is the shady part: if google did not generate its results, that mapping would never have taken place: the user would never have been able to tell Bing that there is relevance between the two unless Google existed.