5 ms·

Because if Bing has to rely on Google Search's solutions to problems it should itself be able to solve, that implies it's inferior technology.

• contextfree 16y ago
  Problems like returning meaningful results for "hiybbprqag"?
  • spiffworks 16y ago
    No, problems like returning meaningful results for "torsoraphy". See the first example that is provided in Danny Sullivan's post.
    • brudgers 16y ago
      Not to rationalize away the similarity between nonsense words and search results, but there are legitimate reasons why gross misspellings might yield similar results. Among them are that similar algorithms may have been derived from similar libraries and academic literature. With 25+ years in the word processor business Microsoft certainly has significant experience with spell check and algorithmically deciphering bungled words - The claim that Google has better code for deciphering jumbled spelling is not self-evident.
      • contextfree 16y ago
        The suspicious part is that the "corrected" version only appeared in one link, the first. So it doesn't seem to have actually recognized the misspelling as such, but associated it with the Wikipedia page through some other mechanism. There's definitely a circumstantial case that it's through the Google clickstream, though I don't think that's the only plausible explanation (especially given that it's a Wikipedia page).
        • brudgers 16y ago
          Right. Typically, Wikipedia would know have a record of the search term being used to reach the page. Of course, it is plausible only if Wikipedia shares that information with others.
• user24 16y ago
  Yes it would imply that, if that were indeed what was going on.
• kenjackson 16y ago
  "rely"? It's using customer behavior as a signal. Someone typing into a search box and clicking a link is a pretty good signal, regardless of where the search happens. This only implies inferior technology if this is the only signal you have in determining relevance, but clearly they have tons of them. The fact that they're trying to capture the totality of the user experience is a very good thing (again with opt-in). Search relevance hasn't progressed as it should. But I think if they could use my web browsing habits it would increase a fair bit. And lastly, Bing and Google are near parity, but not identical. I don't think anyone is under any allusions that neither engine could learn a thing or two from the other. It's not about inferior or not, but trying to get better.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  • joelhaus 16y ago
    Exposing this practice has also introduced another potential problem for Bing. Gaming of their search results. I would expect to see spammers sending many thousands/millions of clicks on specific Google search results through Bing's Toolbar for long-tail queries.
    • ars 16y ago
      You'd first have to get the result to come up as a result of your search. (Although I suppose you could hack the toolbar and send the data manually.)
• mikeryan 16y ago
  I don't think there are many people out there that don't believe Google's technology is superior. Personally, as someone who's held MS stock for a while, I kind of find this tactic to be deviously brilliant. For a dog thats been back in the race for a while I'm okay with them leveraging every angle they have to catch up. There's a ton of mindshare to compete with at Google. This seems to be a fairly effective short cut for Microsoft. I think I'd see things your way more if this were two competing, resource constrained startups. But if its two 800lb gorillas going at it I'm going to have fun watching them trade blows and see how it turns out. Playing "fair" doesn't matter as much to me in this case. But that's just my perspective - everyone will see this differently I'm sure.
  • rfugger 16y ago
    Yes, it was clever, until Google caught them at it and started using it to undercut their "mindshare".
    • kenjackson 16y ago
      I put even money that this helps their mindshare. For people that use Google/Bing explicitly today -- no delta. But for a lot of people this is going to sound like, "Google catches Bing cheating". And for a lot of people this is going to sound like, "Google complains about competitor Bing". Given where Bing mindshare and marketshare is today versus its search qualty, I think this isn't a horrible place to be. Esepcially if it gets people to say, "Let me try a query on Google and Bing and see who is copying?" or to simply see what the hoopla is about. And Google made a mistake when they worked with Danny in getting this story out too. It should have been "Microsoft copies", not "Bing copies".
      • jerf 16y ago
        '"Google complains about competitor Bing"' "Bing is too weak to stand on its own and it knows it, so it cheats." I do not think the court of public opinion is going to let go of the word "cheating" so rapidly. It's a toxic word, and whether or not you think it's true it's supported well enough that it won't matter.
• gojomo 16y ago
  Perhaps 'inferior' in some dimensions, but trying harder with every scrap of legal data they can acquire. That's what I'd expect from any upstart against an entrenched leader, a leader with a long headstart and giant informational advantages via ubiquity and scale. Google leverages every legal scrap of information they can get their hands on to improve their services – including the outlinks of every site they crawl, and clicks of users all over the net. If there's a legal way to observe the users and content of Google's sites for info about which other sites are good – and I haven't yet seen an allegation from Google that Microsoft is doing something illegal – why should any company refrain from using those signals, given Google's giant use of such info from elsewhere?
• ac2u 16y ago
  They don't. They rely on tracking data on performing any search and the resulting click which occurs. Just because Google happens to be the middleman in some of these metrics, doesn't mean there should be a massive leap of logic to the statement: "Bing has to rely on Google Search's solutions".
• mc32 16y ago
  It's not really relying on Google's search solutions at all. It's relying on users' search behavior. It's coincidental that they (users) use Google and that they happen to always click on the bogus result --when no other data are available. Their method, when no data is available for a search term, is to sometimes (7 out of 100?) rely on human ranked results (in this case gamed by Google) via user behavior gathered with their toolbar. It'd be interesting to find out if Bing was only using behavioral results of Google users or they recorded behavior by users of all search engines. Unfortunately, Google don't seem to have conducted an A/B test to find out, so it ended up with confirmation bias.
  • ac2u 16y ago
    You put what I was thinking more succinctly than I could. I don't like the witch-hunt attitude when there's no proof that they directly focused their metrics on Google.
• brudgers 16y ago
  What I see is that Bing filtered out 93/100 of the deliberately planted seeds, and what I don't see is how many times Google sent each seed packet to Microsoft. If Google sent each packet through the Bing tool bar once, it is different than if they sent each one through 1000 times. [edit] In that case what Google did was exploit a feature of Bing toolbar in a manner somewhat akin to an injection attack. It is also not evident what Google tried that didn't work.[/edit] Finally, what I find interesting is that Google basically broke what they claim to be their prime directive - not hard coding search rankings - for PR purposes. There isn't a good story behind that either way. Either approval came from the top, in which case senior management broke the directive to embarrass a competitor or it was broken by cowboys outside of management control. Of course it is also possible that this sort of thing is done regularly within the course of business. [Aside] I want to be the first to dub this "Binggate."
  • cma 16y ago
    "broke what they claim to be their prime directive - not hard coding search rankings" If you consider setting up a honeypot on a term with no hits to really be going against the "not hard coding search rankings" in any meaningful way, you are most likely some sort of obscure Bing ultra-partisan.
    • brudgers 16y ago
      Let's be clear, Google hard coded search results for PR purposes and generated the PR with a 20 engineer black hat operation specifically intended to inject the honeypots into Bing's results. It was not a clever little hack. It was a multi-man year industrial espionage operation utilizing some of the best talent in the industry for the sake of a PR win. The fact that Google's operation only succeeded with 7 out of 100 honeypots is telling evidence that Microsoft is explicitly trying not to do what Google is accusing it of doing given the scale of Google's operation. This has nothing to do with Bing. Google's Prime Directive is their promise and no one else's. The fundamental nature of a promise is that it breaking it is not excused by "the ends justify the means." However, some people may consider a promise to be breakable under extraordinary circumstances. I won't disagree that such a belief can be considered reasonable. But the circumstances under which Google violated their Prime Directive are hardly extraordinary - dragging Microsoft through the mud at a search conference
• ot 16y ago
  > that implies it's inferior technology. Search engines learn a lot from their users. Think of spelling corrections, part of them are learned from users that typed both the mispelled and correct query in the same session. Like in this case, many times better results don't come from better technology, but from a bigger userbase that gives more data to learn from. Google has almost an order of magnitude more users than Bing, hence an enormous amount of data to learn from. IMHO what Bing is doing is a way to tap a (biased, incomplete) part of that data (that also Google has, in their clicklogs) to use it as a signal for crawling and ranking.