16 ms·

Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

111 points by mjfern 16y ago

snorkel 16y ago
"... we embrace and extend them."
bhavin 16y ago
I guess that's best possible defense for them at the moment. "We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"
- gst 16y ago
  > "We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)" What's the difference to what Google does by e.g. using newspaper articles in a "creative" way (by not only showing them in the search results, but by combining them to a new type of newspaper at news.google.com)?
  - Joakal 16y ago
    Bing attempts to heavily monetise their ventures. So basically they're taking away potential eyeballs. And Google did run into a similar issue with news.google.com: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRqFRzuaEPBCS1eMGcdnEj6Ny1ow http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRqFRzuaE...
terryjsmith 16y ago
Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.
- gst 16y ago
  How do you know that they target search sites? This could also be a more generic approach: If there's a link from page A to page B also return page B if someone searches for page A's keywords and there are only few results.
  - jameskilton 16y ago
    Have you read the original claim? Google did a test with completely nonsense words and 100% unrelated search results with those terms. The results showed up on Bing. Whatever Bing is doing, it is using Google's search data. http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
    - gst 16y ago
      I didn't deny that they are using Google's data. But it could be possible that they have some kind of generic approach not specifically targeting Google (or even search engines).
      - piotrSikora 16y ago
        Exactly, they could just observe what user clicks after search (on any search engine, including Bing) and use it as a signal. If that is indeed the case, then they are not copying results from Google, they are just tracking users' choices to improve position of interesting results on Bing. Personally, I don't see anything wrong about that. Keep in mind that in Google's experiment, they always clicked on the first result, which is probably why their result was send to Microsoft and that the experiment "succeeded".
        user24 16y ago
        needn't even be limited to "what user clicks after search" could simply be "what user clicks" They're trying to link Content A and Content B, where "Content" includes page content, URL(including GET string terms), and various other factors. Could happen on every page. Google-fans then tend to get a bit knicker-twisty about privacy implications, but first I dislike that line of argument as it confuses the issue (what are we mad at, the copying or the privacy? Oh I know, we'll say copying and when someone rebuts that we'll start whining about privacy), and secondly, as patio11 eloquently said: Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165682 )
- roc 16y ago
  Don't Chrome and the Google Toolbar also track clickstream data to refine search results? I assumed that's what they were asking my permission to phone home with, to 'improve their services'. Do they gentlemanly ignore clickstreams on competitor web sites?
  - lallysingh 16y ago
    There's what you clicked on, and there's what you typed into a search box, hit enter, and then clicked on. The two are quite different.
    - roc 16y ago
      It's wrong to associate the clicktrail to the content of the page the link came from? How in the world can you tune for search if you can't/don't include context?
yatsyk 16y ago
MS caught on: - optimization for SunSpider [1] - now scrapping google SERP Curious what is next? Linux code is in Win7? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913102 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913102
tristanperry 16y ago
"We do not copy Google's results." Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown. This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. But that's not what today's news is about. A very weak 'reply' from Microsoft which again seems to pretty much confirm that they ARE 'looking at' certain Google results.
- contextfree 16y ago
  It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's". The nuances you detail are buried halfway through Danny Sullivan's article and are not reflected in his takeaway in the conclusion.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's" Which is untrue. They are nowhere near as good.
natch 16y ago
Microsoft: "Music you buy from us Plays For Sure.(TM)" (the above is just my interpretation). Is there a pattern here?
NonMint 16y ago
As always, buried under the platform hate and apologists from both sides, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
  - shadowfox 16y ago
    I know it is fun to categorically dismiss posts with a wikipedia link to some arbitrary fallacy. (Hey. I can do it myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy) But he does have a fraction of a point.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      I agree I should have written something to go along with the link in the lines of "careful with your conclusions" to make my intention clear. It is possible, however, to arrive at a right conclusion through incorrect reasoning.
pg 16y ago
The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Why would potential employees take this negatively? This is exactly the type of thing I'd love to work on. Give me opt-in to your web browsing characteristics, and let me optimize your searches. Opt-in is the key. I'm certainly an odd one here, but I'm more inclined to use the Bing toolbar due to this, although the perf cost is still too high to use any toolbar, IMO. What would be nice is if the browsers had an open format of your browsing history that you can send to providers of your choice...
  - axod 16y ago
    Most people want to work in a company that innovates. This isn't innovation. Any fool can write something that copies data from a competitor.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Like how Google copies the titles of web pages and snippets and puts them in search results? Ahh... the innovation is not in the "content", but how the content is determined. Google crawls the web, copying content, creates and index, and a sophisticated formula for determining relevance of search. MS has innovated by taking this one step further by saying, "if you opt-in we'll use your behavior as part of our index and relevance metric". So they no more copied from Google than Google copies from CNN. But in the same way Google has created value from mined data, Bing has created value from mined opt-in user behavior. That's the innovation. If one can't see that, I think most of these places would do a "no hire" in any case.
      - axod 16y ago
user24 16y ago
I'm quite stunned that Google allowed this story to break. It's such a bold claim, and with such an obvious explanation - Bing use all kinds of click data, whether from Google or not. Did they really not realise that was what was happening, or did they think "this is a certain PR win". Or do they just not have control of what their people say in public? It's like if MS had discovered googlebombing and used it to 'show' that Google were 'copying' from webpages, or worse assumed that Google were manipulating search results. I think Harry was exactly correct to describe this as a new kind of click fraud, and Google's handling of their discovery of it just amazes me.
- shadowfox 16y ago
  It does look like Google thinks this is a PR win. With their comments in the search engine forum and Matt Cuttis' comments in the original HN thread, it is hard believe that this is a "rogue" faction of some sort.
projectileboy 16y ago
I believe Ben Bradlee would call that a "non-denial denial".
jranck 16y ago
This remains as relevant as ever... "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." -Picasso
earl 16y ago
Creating a bullshit opt-out -- that they know damn well virtually no one will ever read -- and then having IE send apparently the entirety of a user's browse behavior to MS is sketchy as all hell. One more reason never to use an MS product.
hristov 16y ago
This is a sloppy article. If you are going to quote a Microsoft blog post in part, do link to it. Does anyone have a link to the blog post in question from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President. The quote sounds pretty evasive but I would like to see the whole thing before I judge. EDIT: I found the post: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/01/thoughts-on-search-quality.aspx?form=MFEHPG&publ=TWITTER&crea=TEXT_MFEHPG_SM0201_bb0201_TW005_1x1 http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... Reading the whole thing it seems like he pretty much admitted copying Google's search results through users of the Google toolbar. He calls it "collective intelligence."
giberson 16y ago
Pragmatically, the following scenario underlines why this is practice is overall bad for the consumer. Company A produces product 1. Company B produces product 2 inferior to product 1. Consumers use product 1. Company B enhances product 2 by actively engaging product 1. Some consumers use product 2. Company B product 2 rises in market share. More consumers user product 2. Company A drops product 1 due to lack of profits. Product 2 quality deteriorates due to absence of product 1. Consumers left with inferior product option.
btig 16y ago
"It’s a point of pride to Google that it believes it has the best spelling correction system of any search engine" Indeed, my 11 year old sister loves typing in silly search terms such as "stroobaray pai" and laughing about the fact that Google actually figured out what she meant :-)

111 points by mjfern 16y ago

"... we embrace and extend them."

I guess that's best possible defense for them at the moment. "We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"

gst 16y ago
> "We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)" What's the difference to what Google does by e.g. using newspaper articles in a "creative" way (by not only showing them in the search results, but by combining them to a new type of newspaper at news.google.com)?
- Joakal 16y ago
  Bing attempts to heavily monetise their ventures. So basically they're taking away potential eyeballs. And Google did run into a similar issue with news.google.com: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRqFRzuaEPBCS1eMGcdnEj6Ny1ow http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRqFRzuaE...

terryjsmith 16y ago

Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.

gst 16y ago
How do you know that they target search sites? This could also be a more generic approach: If there's a link from page A to page B also return page B if someone searches for page A's keywords and there are only few results.
- jameskilton 16y ago
  Have you read the original claim? Google did a test with completely nonsense words and 100% unrelated search results with those terms. The results showed up on Bing. Whatever Bing is doing, it is using Google's search data. http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
  - gst 16y ago
    I didn't deny that they are using Google's data. But it could be possible that they have some kind of generic approach not specifically targeting Google (or even search engines).
    - piotrSikora 16y ago
      Exactly, they could just observe what user clicks after search (on any search engine, including Bing) and use it as a signal. If that is indeed the case, then they are not copying results from Google, they are just tracking users' choices to improve position of interesting results on Bing. Personally, I don't see anything wrong about that. Keep in mind that in Google's experiment, they always clicked on the first result, which is probably why their result was send to Microsoft and that the experiment "succeeded".
      - user24 16y ago
        needn't even be limited to "what user clicks after search" could simply be "what user clicks" They're trying to link Content A and Content B, where "Content" includes page content, URL(including GET string terms), and various other factors. Could happen on every page. Google-fans then tend to get a bit knicker-twisty about privacy implications, but first I dislike that line of argument as it confuses the issue (what are we mad at, the copying or the privacy? Oh I know, we'll say copying and when someone rebuts that we'll start whining about privacy), and secondly, as patio11 eloquently said: Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165682 )
roc 16y ago
Don't Chrome and the Google Toolbar also track clickstream data to refine search results? I assumed that's what they were asking my permission to phone home with, to 'improve their services'. Do they gentlemanly ignore clickstreams on competitor web sites?
- lallysingh 16y ago
  There's what you clicked on, and there's what you typed into a search box, hit enter, and then clicked on. The two are quite different.
  - roc 16y ago
    It's wrong to associate the clicktrail to the content of the page the link came from? How in the world can you tune for search if you can't/don't include context?

yatsyk 16y ago

MS caught on: - optimization for SunSpider [1] - now scrapping google SERP Curious what is next? Linux code is in Win7? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913102 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913102

tristanperry 16y ago

"We do not copy Google's results." Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown. This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. But that's not what today's news is about. A very weak 'reply' from Microsoft which again seems to pretty much confirm that they ARE 'looking at' certain Google results.

contextfree 16y ago
It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's". The nuances you detail are buried halfway through Danny Sullivan's article and are not reflected in his takeaway in the conclusion.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's" Which is untrue. They are nowhere near as good.

natch 16y ago

Microsoft: "Music you buy from us Plays For Sure.(TM)" (the above is just my interpretation). Is there a pattern here?

NonMint 16y ago

As always, buried under the platform hate and apologists from both sides, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

rbanffy 16y ago
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
- shadowfox 16y ago
  I know it is fun to categorically dismiss posts with a wikipedia link to some arbitrary fallacy. (Hey. I can do it myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy) But he does have a fraction of a point.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    I agree I should have written something to go along with the link in the lines of "careful with your conclusions" to make my intention clear. It is possible, however, to arrive at a right conclusion through incorrect reasoning.

pg 16y ago

The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

kenjackson 16y ago
Why would potential employees take this negatively? This is exactly the type of thing I'd love to work on. Give me opt-in to your web browsing characteristics, and let me optimize your searches. Opt-in is the key. I'm certainly an odd one here, but I'm more inclined to use the Bing toolbar due to this, although the perf cost is still too high to use any toolbar, IMO. What would be nice is if the browsers had an open format of your browsing history that you can send to providers of your choice...
- axod 16y ago
  Most people want to work in a company that innovates. This isn't innovation. Any fool can write something that copies data from a competitor.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Like how Google copies the titles of web pages and snippets and puts them in search results? Ahh... the innovation is not in the "content", but how the content is determined. Google crawls the web, copying content, creates and index, and a sophisticated formula for determining relevance of search. MS has innovated by taking this one step further by saying, "if you opt-in we'll use your behavior as part of our index and relevance metric". So they no more copied from Google than Google copies from CNN. But in the same way Google has created value from mined data, Bing has created value from mined opt-in user behavior. That's the innovation. If one can't see that, I think most of these places would do a "no hire" in any case.
    - axod 16y ago

user24 16y ago

I'm quite stunned that Google allowed this story to break. It's such a bold claim, and with such an obvious explanation - Bing use all kinds of click data, whether from Google or not. Did they really not realise that was what was happening, or did they think "this is a certain PR win". Or do they just not have control of what their people say in public? It's like if MS had discovered googlebombing and used it to 'show' that Google were 'copying' from webpages, or worse assumed that Google were manipulating search results. I think Harry was exactly correct to describe this as a new kind of click fraud, and Google's handling of their discovery of it just amazes me.

shadowfox 16y ago
It does look like Google thinks this is a PR win. With their comments in the search engine forum and Matt Cuttis' comments in the original HN thread, it is hard believe that this is a "rogue" faction of some sort.

projectileboy 16y ago

I believe Ben Bradlee would call that a "non-denial denial".

jranck 16y ago

This remains as relevant as ever... "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." -Picasso

earl 16y ago

Creating a bullshit opt-out -- that they know damn well virtually no one will ever read -- and then having IE send apparently the entirety of a user's browse behavior to MS is sketchy as all hell. One more reason never to use an MS product.

hristov 16y ago

This is a sloppy article. If you are going to quote a Microsoft blog post in part, do link to it. Does anyone have a link to the blog post in question from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President. The quote sounds pretty evasive but I would like to see the whole thing before I judge. EDIT: I found the post: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/01/thoughts-on-search-quality.aspx?form=MFEHPG&publ=TWITTER&crea=TEXT_MFEHPG_SM0201_bb0201_TW005_1x1 http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... Reading the whole thing it seems like he pretty much admitted copying Google's search results through users of the Google toolbar. He calls it "collective intelligence."

giberson 16y ago

Pragmatically, the following scenario underlines why this is practice is overall bad for the consumer. Company A produces product 1. Company B produces product 2 inferior to product 1. Consumers use product 1. Company B enhances product 2 by actively engaging product 1. Some consumers use product 2. Company B product 2 rises in market share. More consumers user product 2. Company A drops product 1 due to lack of profits. Product 2 quality deteriorates due to absence of product 1. Consumers left with inferior product option.

btig 16y ago

"It’s a point of pride to Google that it believes it has the best spelling correction system of any search engine" Indeed, my 11 year old sister loves typing in silly search terms such as "stroobaray pai" and laughing about the fact that Google actually figured out what she meant :-)