28 ms·

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

684 points by illdave 16y ago

nhangen 16y ago
The interesting thing here is that Google now has the smarts and power to play games with Bing, and were I MS, that fact would scare me more than any lawsuit.
- 83457 16y ago
  Sounds like an easy way to trick Bing into altering search results as well.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
duke_sam 16y ago
So in an effort to be as good as a competitor MS is watching what you do when you interact with that competitors website and sending that information home. Seems like a really big reason to suggest to anybody you know that they uninstall the Bing toolbar.
zyb09 16y ago
> It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer. Wow, it almost seems that is exactly what they are doing, which is some pretty dirty stuff. Now MS always had a shady track record, but I thought recently the company got a lot better.
- tptacek 16y ago
  You're crazy if you think every player in this space won't opt into "shady" if it means a better user experience. This is just a "shady" we get to hear about.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Like companies give a crap about "user experience" unless that means earning more and more money. Piggybacking like this should really be copyright infringement or something, as there's nothing morally right about it. On the other hand Google should be more quite about this, after all they've built their businesses database for Google Maps / Google Places by piggybacking third-party services like Yelp and TripAdvisor. And now all of a sudden when I'm searching for "restaurants" I have to scroll the page to get past Google's own crap.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
tptacek 16y ago
"Is it illegal? Is it cheating? Is it unfair?" Who cares? Google already got everything it needed out of this situation: a gigantic PR win, and a morale boost for their own team. Well played.
- jobu 16y ago
  I'm happy for Google. Now can they get back to improving their search results? The changes they made last week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286) did help some technical searches, but many results are still being overwhelmed by SEO spammer crap.
  - pinko 16y ago
    Got any good examples? Looks much better to me.
- ghurlman 16y ago
  I'm not sure how gigantic that PR win is, if I had to come to HN to hear about it.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Give it a day to percolate and then we'll see if I'm wrong. I obviously might be.
  - bostich 16y ago
    just after i read this i see an articel on this on the frontpage of financial times germany http://www.ftd.de/it-medien/medien-internet/:suchmaschinen-krimi-googles-microsoft-falle/60006198.html http://www.ftd.de/it-medien/medien-internet/:suchmaschinen-k... headline: googles trap for microsoft
  - trustfundbaby 16y ago
    give it time ... that headline sells itself. If Google pushes the issue, it should be on every night news report by tomorrow night.
bambax 16y ago
Looks like Microsoft is "innovating" again...
- shadowfox 16y ago
  A great deal of value has been added to this conversation by this comment going by the upvotes.
  - bambax 16y ago
    It's a little late for me to elaborate but here's what I meant: Microsoft has a long history of copying its competitors and calling it "innovation". Absent any other evidence, that tends to put the burden of proof on them.
silverbax88 16y ago
I'm not sure about this. It almost sounds like Google is posturing. The reason I say this is that while Google was getting bombed up until last week with scraper sites, Bing wasn't. If Bing was really copying results, they would have reflected the spam sites, because people click on those when they are highly ranked just as often as they click on the originator site. After all, the problem is that the content is identical.
- landhar 16y ago
  Well, the article suggests that there is more to it than just mere copying. The way I see it, Bing is basically taking a look at what is that the user does when it searches for a term that is unknown to Bing. Once they have this initial data, they are able to filter it as they see fit to avoid getting spam results.
- almost 16y ago
  The allegation is that Bing is/was copying results for long-tail queries. The specific example being some very misspelled words. So in no way is the claim made that Google and Bing results are identical (even for most of those long tail results, given that it's only the top ranking pages).
ry0ohki 16y ago
Doesn't the Google toolbar do essentially the same thing they are saying IE is doing?
- almost 16y ago
  If you enable the "show PR" thing on it, but that is (or at least was when I last used it) off by default. And Google specifically say they won't use the data for this sort of thing.
- illdave 16y ago
  I don't think that's true - at least, I've not seen any evidence. There's a good chance the Google toolbar sends back browser data, but I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that Google snoops on what people are searching for on Bing, and what results they end up clicking on, and then adjusts their search results on the back of that.
- jbeda 16y ago
  This is addressed in the article. It says that google uses toolbar latency to determine page load latency and that is the only way toolbar data affects page ranking.
  - patio11 16y ago
    It is widely assumed in SEO circles that Google uses toolbar data, among other sources, for finding new URLs to crawl. They're very enthusiastic about getting all pages on the public Internet into the crawl set. User data gets them there faster and more reliably than a hypothetical competing crawler using only e.g. the observed link graph. Edit: I did some digging to see if I could find an authoritative source on this, and found that Matt Cutts specifically denies this particular usage of user data for expanding the crawl set on his blog. Mea maxima culpa. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/ Edit the second: An amusing note on this general subject: Google will fuzz test certain search forms on, e.g., high value government websites to get at the juicy data behind them which would not otherwise be reachable from just traversing the link graph.
  - 16y ago
keltex 16y ago
Search for "hacker news" on both. The results are quite different. One might argue Bing is better because they don't have a duplicate result at the top.
- mcrittenden 16y ago
  That's not really relevant - the article says that by no means are search results identical for every search.
- BluePoints 16y ago
  'hacker news' is an overly generic word... Bing only 'cheats' when it doesn't know.
frb 16y ago
Doesn't this make Bing practically useless? I mean I go to an alternative search engine to get alternative search results...
- powrtoch 16y ago
  Sure, but if it's the default in whatever app/browser you're using, you might not bother switching to Google as long as it gets decent results.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I suspect that this isn't the only way they determine search results :-) My guess is that they have a relevency metric from their own algorithm, but some results return poor relevency results -- then they may go to this set of secondary results and say, "Are there any results for this query that a higher percentage than expected users clicked on" and then add those results to the list. IOW, this data probably isn't the common case.
wccrawford 16y ago
It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test! In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular. Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to match or beat them, rather than trying to piggy-back on them?
- robryan 16y ago
  Kind of indicative of where the internet is heading these days, a few big platform players which everyone else is piggybacking on. Like Windows Live Messenger attempting to stay relevant by combining facebook chat with it's own network.
- powrtoch 16y ago
  That sounds all well and good, but in terms of cost vs. benefit, it's way easier to make a good application by stealing the years of hard work of the industry leaders than it is to reinvent everything and try to come up with your own clever tweaks to improve it. If you could do it without getting caught, it would practically be a no-brainer.
  - karanr 16y ago
    Yes but it is one thing if a small startup does it, and its another if a giant like Microsoft does it. In a way its applying a double standard, but i think Microsoft has enough money to invest is innovating in search space. Ultimately you can't really prove its illegal, so its a matter of ethics. Strangely we would all encourage a startup to copy what it can, so it can focus on the core innovation and not be bogged down, but we look down on Microsoft. Why is that?
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Isn't this just the McDonald's v Subway/Burger King example? McDonald's has the research and foot traffic. Rather than do your own, watch where the successful McDonald's go and then put your restaurant across the street. If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on your own search engine. The only difference is people have opted in to allowing you to have this info _implicitly_ by going to your search engine vs giving you this permission _explicitly_ by clicking through the EULA for the toolbar.
raganwald 16y ago
Hmmm. Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. But what Bing does is when you use its toolbar, it watches what you do and uses that information to rank results. Is that really copying? It showed Google's Honeypot page because Google's engineers were clicking on the Honeypot page with the toolbar installed. That isn't copying Google's results, that's copying the actions of Bing toolbar users. This can easily be demonstrated. Google can set up a second honeypot but instruct its engineers not to click on the link, ever. If it shows up in Bing's results, then Bing is watching what Google returns and scraping its results. But if the second Honeypot doesn't show up in Bing's results, then clearly Bing isn't copying Google's results, it's copying its toolbar's preference for links. The entire thing is moot to me. The takeaway in't whether Bing copies Google. The takeaway is that Bing's toolbar is spyware :-)
- krosaen 16y ago
  but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?
  - seanalltogether 16y ago
    Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.
    - danpker 16y ago
      But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue
      - 16y ago
yoyar 16y ago
MS has a long history of stealing and sabotage. This doesn't surprise me one bit.
gyardley 16y ago
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.
- random42 16y ago
  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. Edit - Made the PoV clearer.
  - gyardley 16y ago
    No one's stealing Google's code. 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.
    - random42 16y ago
      > 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.
      - encoderer 16y ago
        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.
benohear 16y ago
Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test. Isn't that basic classroom solidarity?
mkowalski 16y ago
It's interresting. A little bit like browser wars, isn't it? Browsers are really similar between themselves. If any new noteworthy feature appears in one, it is very likely to be copied to another, which is a very good thing for end users and is a reason for which competitiveness is good. At the end of the day, users want more-less the same functionality, no matter which browser they use. There are some differences in details and quality, but rather minor. Both Bing and Google are targeted towards mass market and I think people expect the same from both. If Google does it right, there is nothing more to invent. And even if there is, it is probably pretty expensive. It is so much easier to copy than to invent from scratch, just to get something almost exactly the same as Google :) I am really interrested in what could Bing do to be REALLY different or better than Google. And if they did, Google would most likely do something very similar :)
executive 16y ago
Google scrapes websites to determine search results. Bing scrapes websites (Google) to determine search results. What's the problem?
- mahmud 16y ago
  If you think crawling is all there is to search engines, I have wget^H^H^H^H a search engine infrastructure to sell you.
- 51Cards 16y ago
  Look at it like a math problem... Google takes all numbers and figures out the answer itself. Bing writes down the answer from Google's paper. They are hardly the same. Your comment is somewhat like saying "Hey, we're all writing down numbers"
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    This is not a good analogy. An academic environment has different strictures and norms than a business environment. In a business environment, the relevant questions are: 1) does it break any laws? 2) is it profitable? 2b) is it consistent with the image MS wishes to project to its customers and/or regulatory overseers One person's unfair competition is another's brilliant hack.
    - 51Cards 16y ago
      My comment wasn't meant to reference whether it was wrong or right, just the logistics of what is happening.
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    Customers care about results, not about how hard you worked to get those results. This is a fundamental difference between student reward-schedules and rest-of-life reward schedules. There's no credit for effort, unless you can spin it that way in your marketing / branding.
  - encoderer 16y ago
funkdobiest 16y ago
Wait.. MS is copying the competition!?
bbatsell 16y ago
I thought this was the most interesting part: > The day after that, Bing contacted me. They were hosting an event on February 1 to talk about the state of search and wanted to make sure I had the date saved, in case I wanted to come up for it. I said I’d make it. I later learned that the event was being organized by Wadhwa, author of that TechCrunch article. [emphasis mine] So the supposedly independent author of an article on TechCrunch that kicked off a massive wave of Google criticism is, less than a month later, organizing events specifically for a Google competitor? Boy, that sure seems above-board.
- ig1 16y ago
  Matt Cutts from Google and Rich Skrenta from Blekko are also speaking at that event (not to mention Peter Thiel, Esther Dyson, and Malcolm Gladwell). It's an industry event that happens to be sponsored by Bing, it's not really an MS event though.
  - simonk 16y ago
    Still, a TechCrunch & BusinessWeek contributor that gets paid by Bing is interesting.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - cliq 16y ago
      and techcrunch has long been hosting google ads. so.... what?
sjs382 16y ago
No surprise, as both DDG and Blekko disclose that they use Bing for long-tail queries, but it works at both of those engines, too: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mbzrxpgjys http://duckduckgo.com/?q=indoswiftjobinproduction http://blekko.com/ws/hiybbprqag http://blekko.com/ws/mbzrxpgjys http://blekko.com/ws/indoswiftjobinproduction
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Ouch, you're totally right. So you're saying that because Blekko and DDG are powered partly by Bing, the rankings on all three engines are showing the results that Google inserted?
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  They shouldn't be in DDG. That's one of the pieces of intelligence we try to add on top. We try to not "correct" your query. Here's another example of a real search my wife did the other day that illustrates this point on both Google & Bing: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal
  - sjs382 16y ago
    I love that you don't try to correct queries. I hate when Google auto-corrects my query and I need to click another link to get to my actual query. Thanks for that!
    - yaix 16y ago
      Or you just "quote" your original misspelled query and Google will search for the misspelled version without any additional click.
      - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
        It wasn't a misspelling though! That's the point. She is a cancer researcher and she meant that. Renal is for kidneys and Suttle is an author on various papers in the field.
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I had a front row seat for this test. I believe the experiment we ran provides conclusive proof. I'm on a panel with a representative from Bing later today and I'll ask Bing about this directly.
- kgermino 16y ago
  Please keep us posted as best you can.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    I believe the search panel with Google and Bing will be live-streaming, so anyone can tune in. It's by a group called Big Think.
    - illdave 16y ago
      Clickable: http://bigthink.com/series/62 http://bigthink.com/series/62
      - cool-RR 16y ago
        I couldn't find the streaming video from there. Did anyone find it?
        Splines 16y ago
        According to the description it'll be live at 10AM PST (a little before this comment is 2 hours old).
        illdave 16y ago
        I guess they'll put the streaming video up when it starts (10am PST, so in just under 2 hours). That seemed like the most appropriate page to link to.
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
Nitramp 16y ago
"Is this illegal?" IANAL, but in certain jurisdictions, most certainly yes. Many countries have copyright laws that protect compilations of things that are individually not worthy of copyright, for example telephone books. Copying down an individual telephone book entry is of course not a copyright violation, but copying the whole listing in a systematic fashion is. I'd guess that this law applies to search engine rankings as well - rankings/listings of individual items that are not protected by copyright, but where a lot of effort goes into producing the listing itself.
- brudgers 16y ago
  IANALE, but in the US where both Google and Microsoft are headquartered, directory listings are not protected by copyright (though the book itself can be).
  - Nitramp 16y ago
    I assume that Microsoft displayed these search results in e.g. Germany as well, where directory listings do enjoy copyright protection. So if they wanted, they probably could sue.
brudgers 16y ago
Since when has reverse engineering been cheating? If the article is correct, there still is no allegation that Google's algorithms have been used. I don't think Google is in much of any position to cry foul over any company using data mining to tailor search results.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
Bitmobrich 16y ago
Google copies Bing's layout for images. Bing copies Google's search results.
samwise 16y ago
The real question should be why is Google not doing this. Bing seems to be learning from what results users choose and improving their results. Seems like a no brainer, unless i missed something. I also really like this for some reason. It's very ... gangster. Shows that bing is scrappy and willing to bend the rules. That being said, i will still continue using Google.
- samwise 16y ago
  not sure why i'm being downvoted. if you don't agree leave a reply. it's very discouraging
  - raganwald 16y ago
    Your comment begun with +1. It is now at -1. So of all the people that looked at it, some modded it, and of all those people, there are two more people who downmodded it than upmodded it. Two. Right now the post has +186. So assuming that half of those people read your comment, we have something like 93 people who read your comment, and there are just two more downmods than upmods. Unfortunately, HN shows people a comment's score before they read it, which skews results. People aren't objective, they tend to upmod comments that are already upmodded and downmod questions that are already negative. So if you are unlucky and the first one or two people to read your comment are constipated, you get a negative result for not fault of your own. Bad luck, try again. Please don't be discouraged. Try to be helpful and constructive and to present a point of view that others may have missed in the conversation. The upmods will eventually follow. Cast your seeds and let a thousand flowers bloom.
dansingerman 16y ago
My take is this: the whole Google ethos is that they are trying to have the best algorithm to give the best results. Outside of this sting they have always been at pains to put forward the view that nothing is manually ranked. I think the same thing applies to Bing here: if they have a generic algorithm that ranks results based on toolbar (or other data) it could be easy to see how their data is skewed by Google given the amount of traffic Google search gets compared to the rest of the internets. This seems fine to me. But if their algorithm does stuff with activity on google.com because it is google.com then this is a pretty clear foul - it is both essentially copying, and the equivalent of manually ranking results (specifically, Google results) The corollary of this is that if their algorithm is generic, then it will still work if Google were to cease to exist. If it's not generic, it would be useless without Google.
azharcs 16y ago
With Google results filled with Spam & I hardly find a result on the first search, any sane-minded search shouldn't be even replicating (if they are).
1010011010 16y ago
Bing: powered by Google! Bing: now with Google! (suggested taglines)
- 1010011010 16y ago
  Bing Is Now Google!
notahacker 16y ago
The biggest article surprise for me was Google's claim they don't use the toolbar or Chrome directly to improve search queries. I assumed measuring bounce rates and patterns in link graph traversal across the entire web was part of their raison d'etre, as with Google Analytics
napierzaza 16y ago
TL;DR If Bing can't find it for you, it will google it for you.
- alanh 16y ago
  Inaccurate. “If certain users have Googled obscure keywords, results may subsequently appear in Bing for that keyword” is all the experiments showed. Bing is NOT fetching Google queries on its own.
mcantor 16y ago
They should have made one of the search terms "Agloe, New York"! [1] Footnotes [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
notyourwork 16y ago
What was that saying: "If you can't beat em, join em"? disclaimer: this is not my acknowledgement that I agree with the practice.
topcat31 16y ago
Google gathers lots of user data on 3rd party websites via services such as (to name a few): - Google analytics (opted in for data sharing) - Chrome - Google toolbar @Matt Cutts - I'd love it if you could confirm exactly which user data you DO and DO NOT use to influence rankings. Or, at the very least say on record that you don't do what Bing are doing and use data from bing.com Overall, I'm not surprised that Bing are doing this for some keywords - all the major search engines use a massive number of different signals. I'll be more surprised if it turns out this is happening at a large scale or for competitive terms.
darrenkopp 16y ago
So what? Is it a scandal that Walmart and Target both send employees into each others stores and actively monitor prices on items? It's called being competitive, and to be competitive you have to at least match what your competitor is doing, then beat them.
spoiledtechie 16y ago
I personally don't mind if one is copying the search of another. The whole idea is to get the BEST search results possible. And thats what I use a search engine for is getting by far the best results possible. I don't mind how they do it and as far as I can tell they aren't breaking any copyright laws...
- hydrazine 16y ago
  In any case, if Bing is indeed copying Google's results, it is utterly unethical even if users are receiving accurate search results. As mentioned in the article, what Bing is doing is analogous to copying Google's "exam," which by any reasonable standard is wrong, even if a "proctor" didn't specifically state this rule. Perhaps Google has patented a few of its search algorithm components.
tomelders 16y ago
It pains me to say it but... that's genius.
- tomelders 16y ago
  Andy Baio says it, it's ok. I say it and I get down voted.
KirinDave 16y ago
Uhh... Yeah? Everyone in search does this. I've worked at and with 3 major search engine initiatives, and we all tested heavily against Google in a variety of ways. But the article definitely gets a few things wrong. For example, having worked at Bing I can tell you this: in general "obvious" misspellings are autocorrected without comment. It's not some sort of magical copying procedure, it's actually a policy. Want proof? Here's an example query you can repeat: http://fayr.am/4KdG http://fayr.am/4KdG (direct query link: http://fayr.am/4JZD http://fayr.am/4JZD) But otherwise, shit yes everyone is scrutinizing google trying to figure out what they're doing. That doesn't mean other players aren't doing their own optimizations, or even running relevancy metrics against other search engines. Relevancy is not a concept with fixed metrics, and every player in the search market does everything they can to figure out what their competitor is doing. And even the raw results leakage is fairly par for the course. It's not like Bing searches are a crawl of google searches; Microsoft gets this data from browsers running this toolbar and uses it to help shore up queries where they don't return good results.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
gojomo 16y ago
It's instructive to think of the cases where Google can return a search result, even though the searched word doesn't appear on the page. Most often, this occurs because another site includes an outlink to the page, with the searched word. That is, they're 'copying' a publicly-available source that indicates that word is associated with that page. I see this Microsoft tactic as similar. They're considering search terms that resulted in a visit to the page from other search engines as being important indicators of the page content. If they have that URL-to-URL-trail data legally, and the signal works well, and they are not singling out Google's URLs as the only source of such a signal, I'm not sure what the problem is. Google didn't get where they are by throwing out legally-collected useful data, and Bing won't catch up to a leader who has clicktrail sensors everywhere, via analytics/toolbar/ads/mobile/etc., by throwing away legally-collected useful data.
gojomo 16y ago
When asked by SearchEngineLand, Google's Singhal seems to imply Google Toolbar clicktrail data is never used for ranking, but his wording is actually a bit vague: Absolutely not. The PageRank feature sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page. We do not do that, and we will not do that. Put any results could be read narrowly as "this data isn't used to add pages to the index", or more generally as "this data isn't used to rank results relative to each other". Also, Singhal's pledge that "we will not do that" is much stronger than any statement I've ever seen in any Google privacy policy, which all pretty much say Google may use any info they have to improve their services. Matt Cutts, can you clarify if Singhal in fact meant the 'narrow' or 'general' interpretation above? And, if the 'general' meaning, then is there any statement about the use of clicktrail data in Google's published privacy policies that is as strong as Singhal's?
btipling 16y ago
The funny thing is that people with the Bing Toolbar are still using Google to do web searches.
comice 16y ago
Google wasting time embarrassing Bing? I think this is more interesting that learning what Bing are doing. Google are clearly monitoring Bing (and others) as a matter of course. I'm interested to know what they'd have done if they'd found Bing providing better quality results. Would they have spent resources trying to figure out what Bing were doing right, or would that be "copying" too?
dralison 16y ago
Microsoft has long said they have an embrace and extend policy. I guess this is just taking it to a higher level.
NonMint 16y ago
I'm really curious as to how this is different than Bing using google's search results in some form of aggregate pageranking. If we assume that some arbitrary metric of "authenticity" exists for searches and a search for mbzrxpgjys results in results in a low (<0.1%) result for authenticity, but Google suddenly declares that www.page.com is the foremost authority in mbzrxpgjys's, it stands to reason that a good page-ranking scheme would take that into account and bump it to the front of the line. I don't think it's cheating, no where in the article does it claim that they aren't doing their own search, they are just using Google's results as part of their own search algorithm. Is that really such a crime?
contextfree 16y ago
Buried halfway through the article: "These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor quality matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. [...] Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100. Google says it doesn’t know why they didn’t all work, [...]" The writer apparently thinks these results justify concluding the article with this takeaway: "When Bing launched in 2009, the joke was that Bing stood for either “Because It’s Not Google” or “But It’s Not Google.” Mining Google’s searches makes me wonder if the joke should change to “Bing Is Now Google.” okayyyy.
lhorie 16y ago
A few quick thoughts: - generally speaking, the conclusion seems to be that for regular queries, Bing uses mostly other clues to figure out relevance, so this is basically a storm in a cup of water. Regardless, since both Google's and Bing's algos are closed-source, we're going on faith when either company says data gathered from one of their products doesn't affect search quality. - the whole thing about making a ranking overrider and talking about it publicly seems like a stupid move. Why in the world would you say you developed such code and then "deleted it" in an all-code-is-version-controlled-these-days world? This won't go very well against the claims that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services (e.g. email, maps) vs competitors. - The experiment reportedly was triggered because Bing results were getting better for misspelled searches. But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science... - if Google feels that its SERPs are the most relevant possible, shouldn't it make sense that competitors trying to improve relevance will inevitably end up showing the same results as Google on at least a subset of queries? - if you're saying Bing has just as good results as Google, regardless of the means to the goal, then how does publicizing that help the whole "Google's overrun by spam" meme going on?
- tmarthal 16y ago
  <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 http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword 2/ http://website.com http://website.com Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keyword<=>http://website.com 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.
hazelnut 16y ago
uarhhh, he has taken my lollipop
contextfree 16y ago
While the "cheating" angle on this seems hugely overblown, I do think that companies that harvest data through toolbars etc. should be obligated to explain upfront in clear language how they use the data. Not bury it in the legalese of a vast impenetrable ToS.
mukyu 16y ago
"We learn from our customers. We use our customer's data." That sounds like an admission to me, and he is really dodging and spinning the question.
calbear81 16y ago
Give me a break, MS has always played the fast follower game which means they will ride on the work and investment done by the market leader and it's worked out well for them in other parts of their business. Using signals from user behavior on the toolbar on ANY search engine seems to make a lot of sense when it comes to improving search results. MS employees are the biggest QA group for Bing. Internal tools allow employees to tag queries and results that are superior/inferior to Google. Both are displayed side by side and employees provide active feedback to help improve the algorithm and identify more systemic underlying ranking issues.
Groxx 16y ago
>Is It Illegal? 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. Funny... that's the exact same argument software / music piracy often makes.
seasoup 16y ago
Wow, I'm surprised by all the developers on Microsofts side on this one. Google spends a lot of money developing proprietary algorithms for determining search results. Microsoft is then stepping in and taking advantage of the money Google spent by copying some of their results. It's rather like someone taking the results of a Consumer Reports list and publishing it themselves. It borders on illegal, and it's definitely shady. But what I think is more important is all of the flak that Google has been catching for supposedly slipping in its quality of search results. If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results? It's a great method of striking back at the negative PR they've been receiving.
- contextfree 16y ago
  "If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results?" Bing is apparently using toolbar click data (AFAICT it hasn't been shown that this is specifically targeted at Google or even at search engines in general) when it has no other information for the given search term. That has very little relation to the quality of Google's search in general.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bambax 16y ago
> When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home An interesting side-effect is that Bing has in its logs the home IPs of the Googlers involved in this research (i.e., anyone who searched for "hiybbprqag" in Dec. '10).
tzs 16y ago
Do I have this right? 1. User does a search in a Microsoft toolbar, using Google as his search engine. User is searching for $terms. 2. User gets a results page. User clicks on the entry in the results for $site. 3. Toolbar sends back to Microsoft that the $site was the first result the user chose for $terms. 4. Bing uses this to increase $site's placement in searches for $terms. An interesting question then would be whether or not Microsoft also "copies" from Bing? That is, if you are using Bing as your search engine, do they still use the fact that you went to $site after searching for $terms to adjust the rankings?
DenisM 16y ago
TL;DR 1.Bing is inferring search results from user behavior, collected via Bing Toolbar 2. Google team makes an experiment: using Bing Toolbar to feed Bing particular behavior. Namely, they all go from a search result page on Google.com laden with a unique word to a particular target site. 3. Bing infers connection between the unique word and the target site. 4. Google cries cheating.
grandalf 16y ago
In the spirit of sensational, linkbait headlines, here's proof that Microsoft is copying Google's results: bit.ly/hTNYCW
rjvir 16y ago
Perhaps Bing tracks clicks for every search engine, not only Google. If so, they are not copying Google, but legally tracking user behavior across the web.
ZoFreX 16y ago
> For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term If that's accurate, that's a precedent I'd rather not have seen. (a little help on the grammar here, anyone?)
beefman 16y ago
Google are really getting pathetic.
random42 16y ago
Bing responds. http://searchengineland.com/bing-admits-using-customer-search-data-says-google-pulled-spy-novelesque-stunt-63162 http://searchengineland.com/bing-admits-using-customer-searc...
earl 16y ago
The balls on MS people are fucking amazing: "Harry Shum, VP of search development at Bing, responded by admitting that Google had uncovered a new form of search fraud, and said he wished Google had spoken to Microsoft about it before taking it to the press". So bing is either (a) scraping all web behavior out of ie, or (b) scraping G's search engine results, or (c) both -- and dude is pissy because G didn't give them time to get their lies together in private? Amazing. ps -- there's a word for what MS's software appears to be doing: spyware.
tmachinecharmer 16y ago
If Bing is really copying what about those who fought Bing vs Google war as if it were Vi vs Emacs war? By any chance, is Bing named after Chandler Bing? "DuckDuckGo" has become by default. Its awesome.
- tmachinecharmer 16y ago
  also, did anyone took a look at Windows XP source code? I suspect there might be linux kernel in there.
jaekwon 16y ago
In other news, Google has finally figured out why their search result quality has been steadily declining but won't comment on the specifics.
feint 16y ago
This is an ultimate opportunity for Google - Can't they somehow spoof the results that are sent back to Bing. I now if someone was cheating off me in an exam, I would try and give them the wrong answer.
organicgrant 16y ago
Did anyone stop to think that Bing is leveraging IE to improve/influence search results regardless of the URLs this monitored traffic is gleaned from? Google states 9 of 100 planted queries showed up on Bing. You think Amazon, Godaddy, and AOL could make similar claims? Probably...but those examples aren't worried about their market share evaporating.
naithemilkman 16y ago
Instead of whining, I would have gone on the offensive. So we have a competitor copying our search results. Great. Now how can we fuck with that? Figure out the requests coming from microsoft and return a different set of search results (e.g. XXX stuff) so that it doesn't show up for organic google resutls. Set the trap and once bing has incorporated those results for a keyterm, spam TC and LOL at Steve Ballmer gettingn worked up. This discredits the relevancy of bing and all that PR dollars spent rebranding would have gone down the drain. Imagine searching for a harmless search term like 'poodle' and getting hardcore triple xxx results. Oh well, dont do evil right?
known 16y ago
http://www.google.com/xml http://www.google.com/xml
yhlasx 16y ago
bitchez x( [Down voters , u r welcome :)]

684 points by illdave 16y ago

The interesting thing here is that Google now has the smarts and power to play games with Bing, and were I MS, that fact would scare me more than any lawsuit.

83457 16y ago
Sounds like an easy way to trick Bing into altering search results as well.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

duke_sam 16y ago

So in an effort to be as good as a competitor MS is watching what you do when you interact with that competitors website and sending that information home. Seems like a really big reason to suggest to anybody you know that they uninstall the Bing toolbar.

zyb09 16y ago

> It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer. Wow, it almost seems that is exactly what they are doing, which is some pretty dirty stuff. Now MS always had a shady track record, but I thought recently the company got a lot better.

tptacek 16y ago
You're crazy if you think every player in this space won't opt into "shady" if it means a better user experience. This is just a "shady" we get to hear about.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Like companies give a crap about "user experience" unless that means earning more and more money. Piggybacking like this should really be copyright infringement or something, as there's nothing morally right about it. On the other hand Google should be more quite about this, after all they've built their businesses database for Google Maps / Google Places by piggybacking third-party services like Yelp and TripAdvisor. And now all of a sudden when I'm searching for "restaurants" I have to scroll the page to get past Google's own crap.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

tptacek 16y ago

"Is it illegal? Is it cheating? Is it unfair?" Who cares? Google already got everything it needed out of this situation: a gigantic PR win, and a morale boost for their own team. Well played.

jobu 16y ago
I'm happy for Google. Now can they get back to improving their search results? The changes they made last week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286) did help some technical searches, but many results are still being overwhelmed by SEO spammer crap.
- pinko 16y ago
  Got any good examples? Looks much better to me.
ghurlman 16y ago
I'm not sure how gigantic that PR win is, if I had to come to HN to hear about it.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Give it a day to percolate and then we'll see if I'm wrong. I obviously might be.
- bostich 16y ago
  just after i read this i see an articel on this on the frontpage of financial times germany http://www.ftd.de/it-medien/medien-internet/:suchmaschinen-krimi-googles-microsoft-falle/60006198.html http://www.ftd.de/it-medien/medien-internet/:suchmaschinen-k... headline: googles trap for microsoft
- trustfundbaby 16y ago
  give it time ... that headline sells itself. If Google pushes the issue, it should be on every night news report by tomorrow night.

bambax 16y ago

Looks like Microsoft is "innovating" again...

shadowfox 16y ago
A great deal of value has been added to this conversation by this comment going by the upvotes.
- bambax 16y ago
  It's a little late for me to elaborate but here's what I meant: Microsoft has a long history of copying its competitors and calling it "innovation". Absent any other evidence, that tends to put the burden of proof on them.

silverbax88 16y ago

I'm not sure about this. It almost sounds like Google is posturing. The reason I say this is that while Google was getting bombed up until last week with scraper sites, Bing wasn't. If Bing was really copying results, they would have reflected the spam sites, because people click on those when they are highly ranked just as often as they click on the originator site. After all, the problem is that the content is identical.

landhar 16y ago
Well, the article suggests that there is more to it than just mere copying. The way I see it, Bing is basically taking a look at what is that the user does when it searches for a term that is unknown to Bing. Once they have this initial data, they are able to filter it as they see fit to avoid getting spam results.
almost 16y ago
The allegation is that Bing is/was copying results for long-tail queries. The specific example being some very misspelled words. So in no way is the claim made that Google and Bing results are identical (even for most of those long tail results, given that it's only the top ranking pages).

ry0ohki 16y ago

Doesn't the Google toolbar do essentially the same thing they are saying IE is doing?

almost 16y ago
If you enable the "show PR" thing on it, but that is (or at least was when I last used it) off by default. And Google specifically say they won't use the data for this sort of thing.
illdave 16y ago
I don't think that's true - at least, I've not seen any evidence. There's a good chance the Google toolbar sends back browser data, but I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that Google snoops on what people are searching for on Bing, and what results they end up clicking on, and then adjusts their search results on the back of that.
jbeda 16y ago
This is addressed in the article. It says that google uses toolbar latency to determine page load latency and that is the only way toolbar data affects page ranking.
- patio11 16y ago
  It is widely assumed in SEO circles that Google uses toolbar data, among other sources, for finding new URLs to crawl. They're very enthusiastic about getting all pages on the public Internet into the crawl set. User data gets them there faster and more reliably than a hypothetical competing crawler using only e.g. the observed link graph. Edit: I did some digging to see if I could find an authoritative source on this, and found that Matt Cutts specifically denies this particular usage of user data for expanding the crawl set on his blog. Mea maxima culpa. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/ Edit the second: An amusing note on this general subject: Google will fuzz test certain search forms on, e.g., high value government websites to get at the juicy data behind them which would not otherwise be reachable from just traversing the link graph.
- 16y ago

keltex 16y ago

Search for "hacker news" on both. The results are quite different. One might argue Bing is better because they don't have a duplicate result at the top.

mcrittenden 16y ago
That's not really relevant - the article says that by no means are search results identical for every search.
BluePoints 16y ago
'hacker news' is an overly generic word... Bing only 'cheats' when it doesn't know.

frb 16y ago

Doesn't this make Bing practically useless? I mean I go to an alternative search engine to get alternative search results...

powrtoch 16y ago
Sure, but if it's the default in whatever app/browser you're using, you might not bother switching to Google as long as it gets decent results.
kenjackson 16y ago
I suspect that this isn't the only way they determine search results :-) My guess is that they have a relevency metric from their own algorithm, but some results return poor relevency results -- then they may go to this set of secondary results and say, "Are there any results for this query that a higher percentage than expected users clicked on" and then add those results to the list. IOW, this data probably isn't the common case.

wccrawford 16y ago

It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test! In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular. Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to match or beat them, rather than trying to piggy-back on them?

robryan 16y ago
Kind of indicative of where the internet is heading these days, a few big platform players which everyone else is piggybacking on. Like Windows Live Messenger attempting to stay relevant by combining facebook chat with it's own network.
powrtoch 16y ago
That sounds all well and good, but in terms of cost vs. benefit, it's way easier to make a good application by stealing the years of hard work of the industry leaders than it is to reinvent everything and try to come up with your own clever tweaks to improve it. If you could do it without getting caught, it would practically be a no-brainer.
- karanr 16y ago
  Yes but it is one thing if a small startup does it, and its another if a giant like Microsoft does it. In a way its applying a double standard, but i think Microsoft has enough money to invest is innovating in search space. Ultimately you can't really prove its illegal, so its a matter of ethics. Strangely we would all encourage a startup to copy what it can, so it can focus on the core innovation and not be bogged down, but we look down on Microsoft. Why is that?
kenjackson 16y ago
Isn't this just the McDonald's v Subway/Burger King example? McDonald's has the research and foot traffic. Rather than do your own, watch where the successful McDonald's go and then put your restaurant across the street. If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on your own search engine. The only difference is people have opted in to allowing you to have this info _implicitly_ by going to your search engine vs giving you this permission _explicitly_ by clicking through the EULA for the toolbar.

raganwald 16y ago

Hmmm. Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. But what Bing does is when you use its toolbar, it watches what you do and uses that information to rank results. Is that really copying? It showed Google's Honeypot page because Google's engineers were clicking on the Honeypot page with the toolbar installed. That isn't copying Google's results, that's copying the actions of Bing toolbar users. This can easily be demonstrated. Google can set up a second honeypot but instruct its engineers not to click on the link, ever. If it shows up in Bing's results, then Bing is watching what Google returns and scraping its results. But if the second Honeypot doesn't show up in Bing's results, then clearly Bing isn't copying Google's results, it's copying its toolbar's preference for links. The entire thing is moot to me. The takeaway in't whether Bing copies Google. The takeaway is that Bing's toolbar is spyware :-)

krosaen 16y ago
but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?
- seanalltogether 16y ago
  Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.
  - danpker 16y ago
    But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue
    - 16y ago

yoyar 16y ago

MS has a long history of stealing and sabotage. This doesn't surprise me one bit.

gyardley 16y ago

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.

random42 16y ago
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. Edit - Made the PoV clearer.
- gyardley 16y ago
  No one's stealing Google's code. 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.
  - random42 16y ago
    > 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.
    - encoderer 16y ago
      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.

benohear 16y ago

Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test. Isn't that basic classroom solidarity?

mkowalski 16y ago

It's interresting. A little bit like browser wars, isn't it? Browsers are really similar between themselves. If any new noteworthy feature appears in one, it is very likely to be copied to another, which is a very good thing for end users and is a reason for which competitiveness is good. At the end of the day, users want more-less the same functionality, no matter which browser they use. There are some differences in details and quality, but rather minor. Both Bing and Google are targeted towards mass market and I think people expect the same from both. If Google does it right, there is nothing more to invent. And even if there is, it is probably pretty expensive. It is so much easier to copy than to invent from scratch, just to get something almost exactly the same as Google :) I am really interrested in what could Bing do to be REALLY different or better than Google. And if they did, Google would most likely do something very similar :)

executive 16y ago

Google scrapes websites to determine search results. Bing scrapes websites (Google) to determine search results. What's the problem?

mahmud 16y ago
If you think crawling is all there is to search engines, I have wget^H^H^H^H a search engine infrastructure to sell you.
51Cards 16y ago
Look at it like a math problem... Google takes all numbers and figures out the answer itself. Bing writes down the answer from Google's paper. They are hardly the same. Your comment is somewhat like saying "Hey, we're all writing down numbers"
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  This is not a good analogy. An academic environment has different strictures and norms than a business environment. In a business environment, the relevant questions are: 1) does it break any laws? 2) is it profitable? 2b) is it consistent with the image MS wishes to project to its customers and/or regulatory overseers One person's unfair competition is another's brilliant hack.
  - 51Cards 16y ago
    My comment wasn't meant to reference whether it was wrong or right, just the logistics of what is happening.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  Customers care about results, not about how hard you worked to get those results. This is a fundamental difference between student reward-schedules and rest-of-life reward schedules. There's no credit for effort, unless you can spin it that way in your marketing / branding.
- encoderer 16y ago

funkdobiest 16y ago

Wait.. MS is copying the competition!?

bbatsell 16y ago

I thought this was the most interesting part: > The day after that, Bing contacted me. They were hosting an event on February 1 to talk about the state of search and wanted to make sure I had the date saved, in case I wanted to come up for it. I said I’d make it. I later learned that the event was being organized by Wadhwa, author of that TechCrunch article. [emphasis mine] So the supposedly independent author of an article on TechCrunch that kicked off a massive wave of Google criticism is, less than a month later, organizing events specifically for a Google competitor? Boy, that sure seems above-board.

ig1 16y ago
Matt Cutts from Google and Rich Skrenta from Blekko are also speaking at that event (not to mention Peter Thiel, Esther Dyson, and Malcolm Gladwell). It's an industry event that happens to be sponsored by Bing, it's not really an MS event though.
- simonk 16y ago
  Still, a TechCrunch & BusinessWeek contributor that gets paid by Bing is interesting.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - cliq 16y ago
    and techcrunch has long been hosting google ads. so.... what?

sjs382 16y ago

No surprise, as both DDG and Blekko disclose that they use Bing for long-tail queries, but it works at both of those engines, too: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mbzrxpgjys http://duckduckgo.com/?q=indoswiftjobinproduction http://blekko.com/ws/hiybbprqag http://blekko.com/ws/mbzrxpgjys http://blekko.com/ws/indoswiftjobinproduction

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Ouch, you're totally right. So you're saying that because Blekko and DDG are powered partly by Bing, the rankings on all three engines are showing the results that Google inserted?
epi0Bauqu 16y ago
They shouldn't be in DDG. That's one of the pieces of intelligence we try to add on top. We try to not "correct" your query. Here's another example of a real search my wife did the other day that illustrates this point on both Google & Bing: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal
- sjs382 16y ago
  I love that you don't try to correct queries. I hate when Google auto-corrects my query and I need to click another link to get to my actual query. Thanks for that!
  - yaix 16y ago
    Or you just "quote" your original misspelled query and Google will search for the misspelled version without any additional click.
    - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
      It wasn't a misspelling though! That's the point. She is a cancer researcher and she meant that. Renal is for kidneys and Suttle is an author on various papers in the field.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago

I had a front row seat for this test. I believe the experiment we ran provides conclusive proof. I'm on a panel with a representative from Bing later today and I'll ask Bing about this directly.

kgermino 16y ago
Please keep us posted as best you can.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I believe the search panel with Google and Bing will be live-streaming, so anyone can tune in. It's by a group called Big Think.
  - illdave 16y ago
    Clickable: http://bigthink.com/series/62 http://bigthink.com/series/62
    - cool-RR 16y ago
      I couldn't find the streaming video from there. Did anyone find it?
      - Splines 16y ago
        According to the description it'll be live at 10AM PST (a little before this comment is 2 hours old).
      - illdave 16y ago
        I guess they'll put the streaming video up when it starts (10am PST, so in just under 2 hours). That seemed like the most appropriate page to link to.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]

Nitramp 16y ago

"Is this illegal?" IANAL, but in certain jurisdictions, most certainly yes. Many countries have copyright laws that protect compilations of things that are individually not worthy of copyright, for example telephone books. Copying down an individual telephone book entry is of course not a copyright violation, but copying the whole listing in a systematic fashion is. I'd guess that this law applies to search engine rankings as well - rankings/listings of individual items that are not protected by copyright, but where a lot of effort goes into producing the listing itself.

brudgers 16y ago
IANALE, but in the US where both Google and Microsoft are headquartered, directory listings are not protected by copyright (though the book itself can be).
- Nitramp 16y ago
  I assume that Microsoft displayed these search results in e.g. Germany as well, where directory listings do enjoy copyright protection. So if they wanted, they probably could sue.

brudgers 16y ago

Since when has reverse engineering been cheating? If the article is correct, there still is no allegation that Google's algorithms have been used. I don't think Google is in much of any position to cry foul over any company using data mining to tailor search results.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

Bitmobrich 16y ago

Google copies Bing's layout for images. Bing copies Google's search results.

samwise 16y ago

The real question should be why is Google not doing this. Bing seems to be learning from what results users choose and improving their results. Seems like a no brainer, unless i missed something. I also really like this for some reason. It's very ... gangster. Shows that bing is scrappy and willing to bend the rules. That being said, i will still continue using Google.

samwise 16y ago
not sure why i'm being downvoted. if you don't agree leave a reply. it's very discouraging
- raganwald 16y ago
  Your comment begun with +1. It is now at -1. So of all the people that looked at it, some modded it, and of all those people, there are two more people who downmodded it than upmodded it. Two. Right now the post has +186. So assuming that half of those people read your comment, we have something like 93 people who read your comment, and there are just two more downmods than upmods. Unfortunately, HN shows people a comment's score before they read it, which skews results. People aren't objective, they tend to upmod comments that are already upmodded and downmod questions that are already negative. So if you are unlucky and the first one or two people to read your comment are constipated, you get a negative result for not fault of your own. Bad luck, try again. Please don't be discouraged. Try to be helpful and constructive and to present a point of view that others may have missed in the conversation. The upmods will eventually follow. Cast your seeds and let a thousand flowers bloom.

dansingerman 16y ago

My take is this: the whole Google ethos is that they are trying to have the best algorithm to give the best results. Outside of this sting they have always been at pains to put forward the view that nothing is manually ranked. I think the same thing applies to Bing here: if they have a generic algorithm that ranks results based on toolbar (or other data) it could be easy to see how their data is skewed by Google given the amount of traffic Google search gets compared to the rest of the internets. This seems fine to me. But if their algorithm does stuff with activity on google.com because it is google.com then this is a pretty clear foul - it is both essentially copying, and the equivalent of manually ranking results (specifically, Google results) The corollary of this is that if their algorithm is generic, then it will still work if Google were to cease to exist. If it's not generic, it would be useless without Google.

azharcs 16y ago

With Google results filled with Spam & I hardly find a result on the first search, any sane-minded search shouldn't be even replicating (if they are).

1010011010 16y ago

Bing: powered by Google! Bing: now with Google! (suggested taglines)

1010011010 16y ago
Bing Is Now Google!

notahacker 16y ago

The biggest article surprise for me was Google's claim they don't use the toolbar or Chrome directly to improve search queries. I assumed measuring bounce rates and patterns in link graph traversal across the entire web was part of their raison d'etre, as with Google Analytics

napierzaza 16y ago

TL;DR If Bing can't find it for you, it will google it for you.

alanh 16y ago
Inaccurate. “If certain users have Googled obscure keywords, results may subsequently appear in Bing for that keyword” is all the experiments showed. Bing is NOT fetching Google queries on its own.

mcantor 16y ago

They should have made one of the search terms "Agloe, New York"! [1] Footnotes [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

notyourwork 16y ago

What was that saying: "If you can't beat em, join em"? disclaimer: this is not my acknowledgement that I agree with the practice.

topcat31 16y ago

Google gathers lots of user data on 3rd party websites via services such as (to name a few): - Google analytics (opted in for data sharing) - Chrome - Google toolbar @Matt Cutts - I'd love it if you could confirm exactly which user data you DO and DO NOT use to influence rankings. Or, at the very least say on record that you don't do what Bing are doing and use data from bing.com Overall, I'm not surprised that Bing are doing this for some keywords - all the major search engines use a massive number of different signals. I'll be more surprised if it turns out this is happening at a large scale or for competitive terms.

darrenkopp 16y ago

So what? Is it a scandal that Walmart and Target both send employees into each others stores and actively monitor prices on items? It's called being competitive, and to be competitive you have to at least match what your competitor is doing, then beat them.

spoiledtechie 16y ago

I personally don't mind if one is copying the search of another. The whole idea is to get the BEST search results possible. And thats what I use a search engine for is getting by far the best results possible. I don't mind how they do it and as far as I can tell they aren't breaking any copyright laws...

hydrazine 16y ago
In any case, if Bing is indeed copying Google's results, it is utterly unethical even if users are receiving accurate search results. As mentioned in the article, what Bing is doing is analogous to copying Google's "exam," which by any reasonable standard is wrong, even if a "proctor" didn't specifically state this rule. Perhaps Google has patented a few of its search algorithm components.

tomelders 16y ago

It pains me to say it but... that's genius.

tomelders 16y ago
Andy Baio says it, it's ok. I say it and I get down voted.

KirinDave 16y ago

Uhh... Yeah? Everyone in search does this. I've worked at and with 3 major search engine initiatives, and we all tested heavily against Google in a variety of ways. But the article definitely gets a few things wrong. For example, having worked at Bing I can tell you this: in general "obvious" misspellings are autocorrected without comment. It's not some sort of magical copying procedure, it's actually a policy. Want proof? Here's an example query you can repeat: http://fayr.am/4KdG http://fayr.am/4KdG (direct query link: http://fayr.am/4JZD http://fayr.am/4JZD) But otherwise, shit yes everyone is scrutinizing google trying to figure out what they're doing. That doesn't mean other players aren't doing their own optimizations, or even running relevancy metrics against other search engines. Relevancy is not a concept with fixed metrics, and every player in the search market does everything they can to figure out what their competitor is doing. And even the raw results leakage is fairly par for the course. It's not like Bing searches are a crawl of google searches; Microsoft gets this data from browsers running this toolbar and uses it to help shore up queries where they don't return good results.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

gojomo 16y ago

It's instructive to think of the cases where Google can return a search result, even though the searched word doesn't appear on the page. Most often, this occurs because another site includes an outlink to the page, with the searched word. That is, they're 'copying' a publicly-available source that indicates that word is associated with that page. I see this Microsoft tactic as similar. They're considering search terms that resulted in a visit to the page from other search engines as being important indicators of the page content. If they have that URL-to-URL-trail data legally, and the signal works well, and they are not singling out Google's URLs as the only source of such a signal, I'm not sure what the problem is. Google didn't get where they are by throwing out legally-collected useful data, and Bing won't catch up to a leader who has clicktrail sensors everywhere, via analytics/toolbar/ads/mobile/etc., by throwing away legally-collected useful data.

gojomo 16y ago

When asked by SearchEngineLand, Google's Singhal seems to imply Google Toolbar clicktrail data is never used for ranking, but his wording is actually a bit vague: Absolutely not. The PageRank feature sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page. We do not do that, and we will not do that. Put any results could be read narrowly as "this data isn't used to add pages to the index", or more generally as "this data isn't used to rank results relative to each other". Also, Singhal's pledge that "we will not do that" is much stronger than any statement I've ever seen in any Google privacy policy, which all pretty much say Google may use any info they have to improve their services. Matt Cutts, can you clarify if Singhal in fact meant the 'narrow' or 'general' interpretation above? And, if the 'general' meaning, then is there any statement about the use of clicktrail data in Google's published privacy policies that is as strong as Singhal's?

btipling 16y ago

The funny thing is that people with the Bing Toolbar are still using Google to do web searches.

comice 16y ago

Google wasting time embarrassing Bing? I think this is more interesting that learning what Bing are doing. Google are clearly monitoring Bing (and others) as a matter of course. I'm interested to know what they'd have done if they'd found Bing providing better quality results. Would they have spent resources trying to figure out what Bing were doing right, or would that be "copying" too?

dralison 16y ago

Microsoft has long said they have an embrace and extend policy. I guess this is just taking it to a higher level.

NonMint 16y ago

I'm really curious as to how this is different than Bing using google's search results in some form of aggregate pageranking. If we assume that some arbitrary metric of "authenticity" exists for searches and a search for mbzrxpgjys results in results in a low (<0.1%) result for authenticity, but Google suddenly declares that www.page.com is the foremost authority in mbzrxpgjys's, it stands to reason that a good page-ranking scheme would take that into account and bump it to the front of the line. I don't think it's cheating, no where in the article does it claim that they aren't doing their own search, they are just using Google's results as part of their own search algorithm. Is that really such a crime?

contextfree 16y ago

Buried halfway through the article: "These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor quality matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. [...] Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100. Google says it doesn’t know why they didn’t all work, [...]" The writer apparently thinks these results justify concluding the article with this takeaway: "When Bing launched in 2009, the joke was that Bing stood for either “Because It’s Not Google” or “But It’s Not Google.” Mining Google’s searches makes me wonder if the joke should change to “Bing Is Now Google.” okayyyy.

lhorie 16y ago

A few quick thoughts: - generally speaking, the conclusion seems to be that for regular queries, Bing uses mostly other clues to figure out relevance, so this is basically a storm in a cup of water. Regardless, since both Google's and Bing's algos are closed-source, we're going on faith when either company says data gathered from one of their products doesn't affect search quality. - the whole thing about making a ranking overrider and talking about it publicly seems like a stupid move. Why in the world would you say you developed such code and then "deleted it" in an all-code-is-version-controlled-these-days world? This won't go very well against the claims that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services (e.g. email, maps) vs competitors. - The experiment reportedly was triggered because Bing results were getting better for misspelled searches. But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science... - if Google feels that its SERPs are the most relevant possible, shouldn't it make sense that competitors trying to improve relevance will inevitably end up showing the same results as Google on at least a subset of queries? - if you're saying Bing has just as good results as Google, regardless of the means to the goal, then how does publicizing that help the whole "Google's overrun by spam" meme going on?

tmarthal 16y ago
<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 http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword 2/ http://website.com http://website.com Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keyword<=>http://website.com 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.

hazelnut 16y ago

uarhhh, he has taken my lollipop

contextfree 16y ago

While the "cheating" angle on this seems hugely overblown, I do think that companies that harvest data through toolbars etc. should be obligated to explain upfront in clear language how they use the data. Not bury it in the legalese of a vast impenetrable ToS.

mukyu 16y ago

"We learn from our customers. We use our customer's data." That sounds like an admission to me, and he is really dodging and spinning the question.

calbear81 16y ago

Give me a break, MS has always played the fast follower game which means they will ride on the work and investment done by the market leader and it's worked out well for them in other parts of their business. Using signals from user behavior on the toolbar on ANY search engine seems to make a lot of sense when it comes to improving search results. MS employees are the biggest QA group for Bing. Internal tools allow employees to tag queries and results that are superior/inferior to Google. Both are displayed side by side and employees provide active feedback to help improve the algorithm and identify more systemic underlying ranking issues.

Groxx 16y ago

>Is It Illegal? 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. Funny... that's the exact same argument software / music piracy often makes.

seasoup 16y ago

Wow, I'm surprised by all the developers on Microsofts side on this one. Google spends a lot of money developing proprietary algorithms for determining search results. Microsoft is then stepping in and taking advantage of the money Google spent by copying some of their results. It's rather like someone taking the results of a Consumer Reports list and publishing it themselves. It borders on illegal, and it's definitely shady. But what I think is more important is all of the flak that Google has been catching for supposedly slipping in its quality of search results. If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results? It's a great method of striking back at the negative PR they've been receiving.

contextfree 16y ago
"If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results?" Bing is apparently using toolbar click data (AFAICT it hasn't been shown that this is specifically targeted at Google or even at search engines in general) when it has no other information for the given search term. That has very little relation to the quality of Google's search in general.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

bambax 16y ago

> When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home An interesting side-effect is that Bing has in its logs the home IPs of the Googlers involved in this research (i.e., anyone who searched for "hiybbprqag" in Dec. '10).

tzs 16y ago

Do I have this right? 1. User does a search in a Microsoft toolbar, using Google as his search engine. User is searching for $terms. 2. User gets a results page. User clicks on the entry in the results for $site. 3. Toolbar sends back to Microsoft that the $site was the first result the user chose for $terms. 4. Bing uses this to increase $site's placement in searches for $terms. An interesting question then would be whether or not Microsoft also "copies" from Bing? That is, if you are using Bing as your search engine, do they still use the fact that you went to $site after searching for $terms to adjust the rankings?

DenisM 16y ago

TL;DR 1.Bing is inferring search results from user behavior, collected via Bing Toolbar 2. Google team makes an experiment: using Bing Toolbar to feed Bing particular behavior. Namely, they all go from a search result page on Google.com laden with a unique word to a particular target site. 3. Bing infers connection between the unique word and the target site. 4. Google cries cheating.

grandalf 16y ago

In the spirit of sensational, linkbait headlines, here's proof that Microsoft is copying Google's results: bit.ly/hTNYCW

rjvir 16y ago

Perhaps Bing tracks clicks for every search engine, not only Google. If so, they are not copying Google, but legally tracking user behavior across the web.

ZoFreX 16y ago

> For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term If that's accurate, that's a precedent I'd rather not have seen. (a little help on the grammar here, anyone?)

beefman 16y ago

Google are really getting pathetic.

random42 16y ago

Bing responds. http://searchengineland.com/bing-admits-using-customer-search-data-says-google-pulled-spy-novelesque-stunt-63162 http://searchengineland.com/bing-admits-using-customer-searc...

earl 16y ago

The balls on MS people are fucking amazing: "Harry Shum, VP of search development at Bing, responded by admitting that Google had uncovered a new form of search fraud, and said he wished Google had spoken to Microsoft about it before taking it to the press". So bing is either (a) scraping all web behavior out of ie, or (b) scraping G's search engine results, or (c) both -- and dude is pissy because G didn't give them time to get their lies together in private? Amazing. ps -- there's a word for what MS's software appears to be doing: spyware.

tmachinecharmer 16y ago

If Bing is really copying what about those who fought Bing vs Google war as if it were Vi vs Emacs war? By any chance, is Bing named after Chandler Bing? "DuckDuckGo" has become by default. Its awesome.

tmachinecharmer 16y ago
also, did anyone took a look at Windows XP source code? I suspect there might be linux kernel in there.

jaekwon 16y ago

In other news, Google has finally figured out why their search result quality has been steadily declining but won't comment on the specifics.

feint 16y ago

This is an ultimate opportunity for Google - Can't they somehow spoof the results that are sent back to Bing. I now if someone was cheating off me in an exam, I would try and give them the wrong answer.

organicgrant 16y ago

Did anyone stop to think that Bing is leveraging IE to improve/influence search results regardless of the URLs this monitored traffic is gleaned from? Google states 9 of 100 planted queries showed up on Bing. You think Amazon, Godaddy, and AOL could make similar claims? Probably...but those examples aren't worried about their market share evaporating.

naithemilkman 16y ago

Instead of whining, I would have gone on the offensive. So we have a competitor copying our search results. Great. Now how can we fuck with that? Figure out the requests coming from microsoft and return a different set of search results (e.g. XXX stuff) so that it doesn't show up for organic google resutls. Set the trap and once bing has incorporated those results for a keyterm, spam TC and LOL at Steve Ballmer gettingn worked up. This discredits the relevancy of bing and all that PR dollars spent rebranding would have gone down the drain. Imagine searching for a harmless search term like 'poodle' and getting hardcore triple xxx results. Oh well, dont do evil right?

known 16y ago

http://www.google.com/xml http://www.google.com/xml

yhlasx 16y ago

bitchez x( [Down voters , u r welcome :)]