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Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

511 points by atularora 16y ago

c2 16y ago
Isn't it bad form from a marketing perspective to continually mention their top competitor? Does Apple mention android so extensively in their press? As Paul said, customers don't care. All they are doing is giving Bing some front and center advertising on it's blog (which has several non-tech readers) and the tech people who actually care probably don't enough to actually switch search engines.
- lwhi 16y ago
  I think that customers do care a lot of the time. Especially customers of tech companies, who often become evangelists for their chosen platforms and devices. In this case, I don't know how this discussion (verging on disagreement) could occur without mentioning the competition.
- MichaelApproved 16y ago
  If they mentioned bing in a super bowl commercial I'd agree with you but this is a tech blog. I believe there's a difference in the marketing results between the two.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  Well, if you notice, they toed the water first. Google didn't fire right off the bat with the hard-hitting blog entry, but instead basically gave a more detailed version of the same thing to Danny Sullivan. They wanted to see how Microsoft would react before going official with it, because even though Microsoft's response was predictable, there's always a chance that Microsoft would have surprised everyone with their response. (They didn't, in my opinion.) What's struck me most about this story as it has developed throughout the day is that Google's actions are very deliberate and planned. I wouldn't consider Google as continually mentioning Bing, either; in fact, I don't think they've paid much attention at all to them. Put Bing in the search box on their official blog, and you'll see that this is the only post specifically about Bing -- a perusal of older posts indicates that the rest are hitting on comments or TrackBacks (i.e., the background image misfeature).
wardrox 16y ago
What a very clever way to test their theory. I'm very curious to see how Microsoft explain this one. Also, why do I now want to buy things with "hiybbprqag" printed on them?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Gibbon 16y ago
  It's not really that clever.. it's the search equivalent of a trap street in cartography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
atularora 16y ago
Some perceive Google's stand with hypocrisy e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status/32568646026924032 http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status/3256864602692403...
- chc 16y ago
  That tweet is drawing a very specious connection. Android did not, as far as I can tell, copy any of Apple's algorithms or piggyback on top of them. It is a novel implementation of some of the same ideas in the iPhone. Similarly, it's plagiarism if you take a Harry Potter book and publish your own version with the names changed, but James Patterson's "Witch & Wizard" has a copyright of its own despite being rather similar in concept. (Edited to remove question about phrasing thanks to atularora's clarification.)
  - atularora 16y ago
    standby -> stand. Sorry for the typo
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    The tweet author might be referring to recent claims that Android contains non-licensed Sun code.
    - chc 16y ago
      That could be, but it would make even less sense to me. If they're talking about copying Apple, at least they did copy something from Apple, if only an idea. The copyright infringement claims have never been substantiated at all — it's just an accusation.
  - ecopoesis 16y ago
    While Android it obviously inspired by iOS, it's not a direct copy. A better example of Google's hypocrisy is their outright copying news articles into Google News despite the source companies asking them not to.
chaosmachine 16y ago
Will any Bing users suddenly switch to Google because of this? Probably not. Will people who've never heard of Bing be reading about them in the paper tomorrow? Yes. Will complaining about competition from underdogs make Google look bad to some? Yes. I don't see how making this a public issue is a win for Google. Seems like something they should have kept in their back pocket. "Keep your enemies closer", as they say.
- alecco 16y ago
  If the privacy bit is properly reported in MSM, it should definitely raise some concerns. Think corporations with sensible data and all that.
  - chaosmachine 16y ago
    The thing is, Google monitors which search results you click, too. Bing's toolbar just does it via browser integration. Google can and does track clicks from Bing via Google Analytics. Every time you click a result on Bing and land on a page using Google Analytics, Google knows about it, and they record your Bing search terms from the referrer. The same is probably true for pages with Google ads.
    - alecco 16y ago
      But as Matt Cutts pointed out, there's a very clear red warning on Google Chrome while IE just silently gives you a very unsuspicious disclaimer.
      - teaspoon 16y ago
        What does Chrome have to do with this mode of tracking? Google Analytics will capture a referrer from any browser that includes it, and no browser that I know of displays a "red warning" when including it.
        kissickas 16y ago
cookiecaper 16y ago
I think this is silly. Unless Google can come up with a copyright claim on its search results, and I seriously doubt they can, they have nothing to complain about. I use Google's search results too -- information you pump out publicly can be used to the advantage of your customers as well as your competitors. If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them. Accept that freely available information is freely available or clamp down and stop publishing information that might help your competitors. In Google's case, unfortunately, the info that helps Bing is also the info that is essential to Google's customers. I know of some other media companies that are hyper-paranoid about their mass produced, widely disseminated, public content being "stolen" by others, maybe Google should set up a lunch date with the RIAA.
- MichaelApproved 16y ago
  Your argument is seriously flawed. Just because something is made publicly available doesn't mean it's free and clear for anyone to reproduce. For example, if I don't chain my bike it doesn't mean anyone is allowed to steal it. Taking my bike is still a crime. How I protected it has nothing to do with the criminal act.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    Stealing a bike necessarily deprives a person of his property. Copying your competitors when they do something people like is a time-honored tradition and certainly not illegal as long as the copying occurs along certain guidelines. If Bing was scraping Google en masse and just putting a "Bing" interface on it, Google might have something here, but looking at Google's results and deciding they have some better results (and it's unclear if they even did that) and then making sure you have the same "better" results on your page too is not wrong, and deprives no man of his property. This is merely Google whining that Bing is delivering sort of good results because that threatens Google.
    - MichaelApproved 16y ago
      The stealing a bike example goes to counter the parent's argument that they can't complain if they don't protect their content. As to whether this is a crime or not would probably be a copyright issue. If Google had a valid legal claim I bet they'd make it in court.
hasenj 16y ago
I don't see anything wrong Bing is doing. There's clearly an indirect link between the synthetic query and Google result. If Bing was outright stealing Google results, all you have to do is: 1. setup the synthetic queries on Google 2. search for them using Bing Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y. The Bing toolbar has the right to assume there's a relationship between X and Y. It's a legitimate "ranking" strategy.
- contextfree 16y ago
  "Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y." ... and even then it only worked for 7-9% of "synthetic" nonsense queries.
- MichaelApproved 16y ago
  The time it took bing to show the results has nothing to do with the fact that they took it from googles result pages. They clearly took the results from google or possibly from another source that took it from google. Bottom line, the results came from google.
  - VBprogrammer 16y ago
    In my view this is only a problem if IE8 / Bing Toolbar has a line which is effectively: if current_page == "www.google.com": """ Steal results from competition """ Otherwise, generically applying this on other sites is clever and innovative. Effectively turning every user into a web-crawler with a built in mechanical turk to rank useful links on that page. I think google are framing the debate well, and perhaps exposing something that isn't exactly privacy friendly but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage.
    - moultano 16y ago
      >but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage. If you've denied google access to your site in your robots.txt, then it would be a reasonable claim. (Google has denied bing access in its robots.txt)
seanalltogether 16y ago
Google should proceed with caution, do they really want to get dragged into a debate about tracking user actions to influence search results?
- nikster 16y ago
  I think there's a very clear ethical divide. Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service. With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page. Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.
  - barake 16y ago
    Google clearly stated in their blog post they used IE8 and the Bing toolbar with settings that provide user experience data to MS (for the Suggested Sites feature and such). I'm sure Google's toolbar and Chrome phone home if you let them, too. Unless I'm missing something just running Windows isn't enough for MS to do the kind of data collection Google is claiming.
  - davidu 16y ago
    You fail to understand the issue here. None of this stuff is on by default in Windows. You have to install the Bing toolbar.
- barista 16y ago
  This whole accusation by Google was very childish... and I thought adult supervision was no longer required at Google ;)
  - brianobush 16y ago
    Would a lawsuit be better? I think that this is a better problem to be sorted outside of the courts. Too often we rely on courts to solve our problems.
eps 16y ago
What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google...
- akavlie 16y ago
  Well, Windows doesn't come with grep, so...
  - akavlie 16y ago
    Well I guess THAT joke fell flat. Oh well...
- callmevlad 16y ago
  I imagine it's because they want the Google results as input even (and especially) in cases when there are indeed results.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google... Because what you describe would be underhand and probably a violation of Google's ToS that could cost them very dearly in PR and money (in a court case). They have access to user data that users say they can access (click-through or whatever) but they don't have access to Google search results directly unless Google allow this (which I've not checked but can't imagine they do allow). The grey area is that Google's ToS relates to their relationship with their clients (people who search using Google), do they disallow their clients if they're using MSIE with tracking? Doubtful, if they did (by a technicality say) then they could sue their clients but they couldn't (a priori) sue MS as MS are acting in good faith in their relationship with the same clients (people using MSIE allowing data tracking). The onus would appear to be on the Google users not to have tracking enabled (if indeed Google's ToS disallow such things). Why not just grep Bing logs ... well clearly they can tell a lot about the relevance to a particular term by seeing how long a user spends on a page after searching for that term and following a link. If the user bounces then it's not likely to be high quality. This sort of info won't be easily gathered from Bing logs if indeed it is possible to get at at all.
droz 16y ago
I think they (google) can really only cry foul if there is specific code in the Bing toolbar that targets google's search results. The way that they describe the approach, it seems like the Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo, altavista, ask.com and many others.
- mishmash 16y ago
  >Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo Isn't Yahoo search powered by Bing anyway?
andrewljohnson 16y ago
Setting aside the ethical questions, because I don't really care, when I look at the probable outcomes of this, I think it's wise for Google to point out what's going on here. This string of stories positions Google as the smart, sciency search engine, and Bing as a collection of hacks. This is how I'd want the public to perceive the battle if I were Google. But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally. As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.
- tmsh 16y ago
  Yes, but historically this is how Microsoft wins. They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade). I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win. ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso... Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization.... ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
  - city41 16y ago
    Yes but when Microsoft took on Apple back in the day, they were young, agile and relevant. The same is much harder to say of the MS of today. They aren't winning very often anymore, especially in the consumer space. And I say this as a Microsoft alum and really enjoyed my time at the company.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
From http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-... >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 This is actually just IE's "spying" working properly. If an MSIE user that has allowed Microsoft to see their browsing habits follows a link after a search then MS are associating that link. This is sensible as it's measuring actual visits following a given search. If someone searches for a googlewhack and Bing have no results for that term then it's natural that MS would then use this data to associate the googlewhack with the visited page. Initially I thought this sounded like MS being underhand but really they're tracking their users and associating their users search terms with the pages that they visit - _not_ using this data for search (given they have permission) would be silly, no? The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??
- narrator 16y ago
  >The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings?? You sir, have won the thread.
d0mine 16y ago
It is unclear whether the Google results appear in Bing from the same computer the initial queries were made i.e., it is a personalization of search results or Bing uses that results for other users too.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
Is it possible bing is pulling the results from a third party provider who is doing the cheating? Maybe a middle man is partially whats to blame for the delay in the results.
sdrinf 16y ago
Here's an alternative hypothesis: the bing toolbar might look for explicit search queries (either strings entered into a textbox, or q=, query= parameters), and navigation from such pages to external domains. This would match all "search engines" in the most relaxed meaning of the term: product search, thesaurus, lexicons, dictionaries, everything; and I'd argue to be a legit signal for a "general search engine" to match. (Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first.) If this is the case, Google isn't being picked upon; rather, they are merely the first, who figured this out externally. Cookie for the scientific rigor, but no cigar for the way they PRd the story. Correlation, after all, does not equal causation.
- mda 16y ago
  Well, while doing this they clearly knew that Google is by far the biggest search engine in the world, and naturally most of the data would be coming directly from Google. Right?
  - sdrinf 16y ago
    This, in fact, could be quite wrong. Consider the fact, that most modern websites include a search engine of one form, or another; and the usage graph of the web has an extremely long tail. Even considering the top 100 most visited websites on Alexa: all of them has a search form, and only 20 or so belongs to Google; it's very easy to see how the aggregated usage of the other 80 could be much, much higher, than the aggregated usage of Google properties. Therefore, while Google might be single most impacted organization in the world, most of the data comes from non-google properties. And none of this has anything to do with my original argument of the algorithm itself being benign.
  - keeganpoppen 16y ago
    Why does that matter? They're only "stealing" results from Google insofar as people (/Google employees) used Google in order to illustrate what pages they want returned given a certain search query. I have a sneaking suspicion that the exact same thing would have happened if they were in the position to do the same query bombing on Ask Jeeves or crappywebsearch.net as it did for Google. Search engines to me are an obvious case of a means to an end. If a search engine better than Google were to come out tomorrow I would switch to it (from Google) instantly with no regrets. Google's sense of propriety about their results (or, more accurately, what users clicked on after searching via Google), especially given the fact that they are well-known for their penchant for sucking in user data like a black hole (not that I care-- I want them to use it if it means better searches), to me seems 9 parts hypocritical and 1 part prima donna. Need people be reminded that this is the same company that "accidentally" logged users' WiFi browsing habits while driving StreetView cars around Europe? Give me a break. Everyone is guilty, and no one is going to do anything differently now than they did before.
caf 16y ago
"You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank." It's actually more like trap streets on maps.
jeroen 16y ago
These seem to be the relevant parts of MSs responses: "Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites." “We do not copy Google’s results.” I see MS denying _copying_, not denying _using_ Google search results. That makes the title of the Google blog post incorrect.
tristanperry 16y ago
Good for Google. Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.' Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this. I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing). So yeah: good for Google. Bad for Bing.
callmevlad 16y ago
I can only imagine the confusion the Clyde-Findlay Area Credit Union SEO team is going through right now: "Why are we getting so much traffic from people searching for 'delhipublicschool40 chdjob'?"
- juddlyon 16y ago
  I thought the same thing about Team One Tickets: "Is hiybbprqag some new band the kids like? Why don't we have tickets for them?"
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BarkMore 16y ago
Google could have made this story all the more interesting by using misspellings of the terms nihilartikel and mountweazel in the honeypot queries.
pedanticfreak 16y ago
Why didn't Google's investigation go further? Why didn't they decompile the IE8 toolbar to figure out what it was really doing? Maybe that's against the DMCA and Google can't admit to it? Having the evidence in code would have made the accusation irrefutable.
- jkterhune 16y ago
  Agree. I have to imagine that someone at Google captured the toolbar's HTTP traffic. Maybe they're holding it back, or maybe it's the same for Google results as it is for, say, Lycos.
brudgers 16y ago
>"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops" OK, over the course of several weeks 20 google engineers were able to inject 7/100 false searches into Bing's database. That is more structured like a brute force attack than a scientific experiment. Is Google really surprised that SEO works? [edit]The blog contains nothing significant about methodology - no control groups, no restrictions on automation, no limits on methods used. In other words, what this shows is that 20 Google Engineers were able to hack Bing and that they did so for PR purposes.[/edit]
thought_alarm 16y ago
Google developed an impressive spell correction and error detection algorithm to improve their search results. Microsoft inadvertently benefits from Google's research by simply watching and recording how people use Google. The end result is a Microsoft product that isn't as good as its competition, but it's good enough for some people. Sound familiar? It's a classic case of true innovation vs. "Microsoft" innovation.
rome 16y ago
Do I understand this right? Google (over a period of time)knowingly submitted info to Microsoft. When Microsoft used that data, Google accuses them of copying? Does Google use the data I give them? Are they copying me?
- txxxxd 16y ago
  Close, but you didn't understand it quite right. Google knowingly submitted info to Microsoft to confirm a suspicion that Microsoft was using google.com search results from other users to populate bing results.
aneesh 16y ago
Why do people think there's anything wrong here? Here's a (hypothetical) similar example: In the 1990s, it probably look a lot of iterations, user studies, and market research to decide that copy/paste, undo, etc were the "right" set of features to include in a word processor. Do you think Google Docs re-did all that research? No, of course not. They probably just looked at Word and said, "we need to support these features". And there's nothing wrong with that. This is the exact same thing. If you have a product out in the market, it's fair game for your competitors to look at and analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and use those to improve it's own product.
- BoppreH 16y ago
  I see it more as copying the toolbar item by item.
- j_baker 16y ago
  There's a difference between looking at word's copy/paste and deciding you want to make your own and making your copy/paste a hack around Word's copy/paste.
neild 16y ago
The number-one point I take away from this isn't about ethics or what is "right". It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning. They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results. That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.
- chucknthem 16y ago
  Disclosure: I'm interning in the Bing team at MS but my statements here are mine only and do not reflect that of Microsoft. I don't see how this indicates that they've given up on Bing. They're spending a lot of money on the online services team, even making a loss for the past several quarters to improve Bing. They're playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive while they get their algorithms up to scratch. It's better than the alternative of loosing all their customers/market share and then have no data to help them improve. I see this more as a compliment to Google, even though Google certainly doesn't see it that way, and I can definitely understand their frustration.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    "[Bing is] playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive" Since you're interning in the Bing team, I'll ask: did a lot of people at Bing know about Google's rankings as a data source in Bing? I'll understand if you can't answer, but I'm genuinely curious.
- zaidf 16y ago
  They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning. Sounds like a very rational position. Anything less could be termed 'delusion' on Microsoft's part. And for the longest time, they were delusion about the search market in general. No longer. They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results. Google being an additional source of data for them does not equal Bing "giving up on bettering Google".
rodh257 16y ago
I'm a bit confused - see this image, from Google Analytics on my blog. http://i.imgur.com/oWK8q.png http://i.imgur.com/oWK8q.png Google Analytics knows that the search term 'autodesk revit devlopers guide' on Bing lead someone to my blog. I take it this information is in the HTTP header on the request to my site which the Google analytics code reads. If Google were to use Google analytics information in their search results, how would that be any different to what Bing is doing? Or is the distinction that Google claims not to do this?
- joevandyk 16y ago
  The referer is in the http headers. Whereas Bing is using IE toolbars to upload Google search results.
- gregable 16y ago
  From http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-using-google-analytics-have.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-using-google-anal... "[Google] Search Quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking ... You can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won't affect your ranking within Google Search results." It's dated middle of last year, I guess it's possible that something has changed, but nothing I'm aware of.
  - deleted 16y ago
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- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  We don't use Google Analytics data in any way in our search rankings. The reason is that we wouldn't want a site's rankings to benefit just because they chose to use Google Analytics.
dfranke 16y ago
More interesting than anything Microsoft is doing here is Google's answer to it. If Microsoft caught Yahoo doing this, they'd bury them in lawyers. Google is confident enough to just go public and take the PR win.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  I guess they gave up the idea of suing because they were unlikely to win. Even if Bing was directly scraping Google's results from Bing's servers, it's iffy because robots.txt is not something that's enforceable, and listings of things are not copyrightable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
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ecopoesis 16y ago
It's funny that Google has a problem with Microsoft using their content (the search rankings), yet has no problem taking content from places TripAdvisor (http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/14/news/tripadvisor-shrugs-off-reports-google-blockade-still-in-place/ http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/14/news/tripadvisor-shrugs-off-...) and newspapers (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fold%2Fcontent%2F2006%2F02%2F6095.ars&ei=jsRITYfAHoiq8Aag6NSsBg&usg=AFQjCNFtRwakdQRICDmGh4YSIRm5xXN1TA&sig2=DPLaZ5dASlNDaZKiEc4O5A http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&s...), even when those companies specifically ask Google to not. Google should be more careful here: either it's OK to repurpose other site's content or it's not, and Google has built their entire business around repurposing content. They shouldn't be surprised when their competitors start doing the same.
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krisrak 16y ago
use hashtag #BingGate
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ot 16y ago
As many others have said, I don't think that using click data from the browser/toolbar as one of thousands signals can be considered "copying". When doing a query with a nonexistent word, all the other signals are zero because there is no knowledge about the query, so the only remaining one is the history of clicks "sniffed" from Google/etc... SERP. OTOH, on real world queries the signal has probably a relatively low weight. I don't think that it is a secret that Bing uses click data from browser/toolbar as a signal, it's just a not well known fact. For example in the paper "Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data" (http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf) by Microsoft Research, they explain how to improve the spelling corrections by using click data from "other search engines".
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  The paper you mentioned appears to be saying that Microsoft is extracting spell corrections via clicks on Google. That's pretty surprising news. I just pulled down the paper and noticed this: "The clickthrough data of the second type consists of a set of query reformulation sessions extracted from 3 months of log files from a commercial Web browser .... In our experiments, we "reverse-engineer" the parameters from the URLs of these sessions, and deduce how each search engine encodes both a query and the fact that a user arrived at a URL by clicking on the spelling suggestion of the query – an important indication that the spelling suggestion is desired" Some of the recent discussion has been about whether Microsoft looks at lots of different sites vs. doing something special or different for Google. This paper very much sounds like Microsoft reverse engineered which specific url parameters on Google corresponded to a spelling correction? Figure 1 of that paper looks like Microsoft is using specific Google url parameters such as "&spell=1" to extract spell corrections from Google. Targeting Google specifically is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places. It looks like you work at Microsoft--can you say any more about this?
  - ot 16y ago
    > The paper you mentioned appears to be saying that Microsoft is extracting spell corrections via clicks on Google. Well, no, that's a research paper that says that they have made experiments in that direction, but this doesn't imply that this is currently done in Bing. But it gives an hint about what kind of data is available from the "log files from a commercial Web browser". > Targeting Google specifically is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places. From the article, they have handcrafted rules for both Google and Yahoo, that together with Bing have (I think) the 95% of the market. I'd say they are not targeting Google, they are targeting the majority search engine users. There just happen to be only 3 major search engines, so a few handcrafted regexes are sufficient. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps has handcrafted (or manually tuned) scraping code to extract reviews from Yelp and other major review sites, and same for Google News for the extraction of the news body from the major online news sources. How is this different? > It looks like you work at Microsoft--can you say any more about this? Yeah, I should have been more clear about this. I am interning at MSR and have some involvement with Bing (and actually worked there last year), but my comments are personal and about facts that are public. BTW, IMHO using the click logs can't be considered "copying", more like "a way to discover new sites to crawl and the keywords that lead to them". This is not copying the SERP results. Since it "looks like" you work at Google :) can you answer this question (it was also asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165963 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165963)? Doesn't Google use Chrome to get traffic statistics, through the opt-in "send usage statistics" and the malicious site protection?
ellyagg 16y ago
The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovations of Apple. They organized with Apple's competitors to provide an offering extremely similar in spirit and often in form to what the iDevices do. There is zero chance Android adopts all the "conventions" it has without copying Apple. The world was not on a fast track to full phone, bright screen, touch capacitive displays and gestures and app markets before Apple pioneered them. iPhone was not the logical inevitable implication of the technology that had gone before. If Google thinks Bing is not playing fair, Google has 10x as much to answer for in real damages to Apple for thieving their innovation. Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google. Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.
- henryw 16y ago
  The degree to which Microsoft is copying Google is to a much higher degree. Google did not do an exact "copy/paste" like Microsoft did here. At least Google did it from scratch.
  - gscott 16y ago
    Google started with something, probably by scanning the Yahoo directory and starting from there. If they just pointed Googlebot to one site they would never get the whole web, they had to start from some source with a lot of sites that they could then branch out from.
    - lazugod 16y ago
      And depending on the state of Yahoo's (or Lycos' or Altavista's) robots.txt at the time, that may be defendable.
- kemiller 16y ago
dholowiski 16y ago
Did they do the same test with blekko or duckduckgo too? It would be interesting to see if Microsoft is the only one doing this. I would try it now, but the test has been polluted by all of the news articles.
maeon3 16y ago
Google should have kept quiet, and figured out how Microsoft is pulling data from Google. They could then create a script that would cause Bing to link new borrowed content to goatse.
- AmazingMe 16y ago
  bing only sees, what google's customer are seeing. so Google can't do it without screwing its own search results, and even worse it won't affect top 1 million query strings, as for them bing is getting much stronger signals from other sources.
sliverstorm 16y ago
I may be misunderstanding what is happening, but is it possible Bing is just doing what it was programmed to do- examining the user's browsing habits? Is it necessarily directly and purposely targeting Google?
radicaldreamer 16y ago
This is an excellent short term PR tactic, but Microsoft can just say that they're not copying Google's results, they're just using user click data to improve their search results and that sometimes that click data happens to come from users' google searches. It's understandable why Google's concerned, because it's likely that Microsoft has access to a lot more this data due to their OS and software's ubiquity.
Athtar 16y ago
Seriously? Anybody else surprised at how little data there is given how serious the accusations are? From what I've read, the general consensus seems to be that Microsoft is using IE in conjunction with the Bing toolbar to analyze user's search data. And this is something that worked only on 6 or 7 of the 100 terms that they tried it with? That was enough to incriminate Bing? Google could've at least tested to see if this behavior is limited to just Google or if Bing was also analyzing other search engines (or even other pages). I would've expected MS to have released something like, not Google.
slackgentoo 16y ago
Take a look at feature list here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mslr/feature.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mslr/feature.as... Combing features 130, 131, 135 and 136, I think it is understandable what Google engineers did can give those fake links a boost in the search results. In a way, they cheated the algorithm.
enthalpyx 16y ago
"so Google set up a honeypot – some made up words like [hiybbprqag] linking to random unrelated sites." That's not my understanding of what Google did at all. Google fed back search results for keywords that didn't exist on the Internet -- period, and they started eventually showing up in Bing.
littlestove 16y ago
How about this analogy? If Company A publishes a book and Company B somehow manages to get the content of the book from its readers (with their consent). Then B publishes the same content as if it is original content, how does that sound to you?
mmaunder 16y ago
Well, at least Bing will get a pagerank boost from all the new backlinks in the press coverage.
Natsu 16y ago
They should have made one of the nonsense queries something like "westealourresultsfromothersearchengines" and linked it to something like yes.com just to make the copying easier for non-tech people to understand.
kcdenman 16y ago
Another example like this that has just come out - Qwiki by Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of facebook. The new search engine pulls data for its results directly from Wikipedia and adds it's own flare. The open source text comes directly from Wikipedia. Qwiki - see contents http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_vi_of_the_united_kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_vi_of_the_united_kingdom
kowsik 16y ago
this is brilliant. all those years of "innovation" ruined by a simple MiTM tap.
- kowsik 16y ago
  http://labs.mudynamics.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-and-omg-you-copied-me/ http://labs.mudynamics.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-and-omg-yo...
jetaries 16y ago
I think this is a very bad move by Google to get into these types of pointless arguments. Google being in the market leader position, there is nothing Google can gain from doing this. Google won't convert Bing users over with these acquisitions, all Google doing is raising awareness for Bing. If anything, Google would lose users to Bing for doing this. If anyone from Google reading this. This is not a smart move, and should be ended asap.
random42 16y ago
Google, you are embarrassing yourself.
bayjinger 16y ago
Think I'll just quote Mike Masnick's post over at techdirt, since he sums it up so well: "For Google to attack a competitor for using open information on the web -- the same way it does -- seems like the height of hypocrisy. It's fine for Google to crawl and index whatever sites it wants in order to set up its ranking algorithms, but the second someone looks at Google's own rankings as part of their own determination, suddenly its "cheating"? This seems like the latest in a series of indications that Google has moved past the innovation stage into the "protecting its turf" stage. That would be a shame." http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110201/11022312911/googles-childish-response-to-microsoft-using-google-to-increase-bing-relevance.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110201/11022312911/google...
kaze1 16y ago
Never mind the ethics part. The fact that Bing's 'signal gathering' mechanism can be fooled into accepting some bogus links, without even an iota of content verification, illustrates a fatal flaw. I am sure developers at MS are capable people, but this throws poor light on them (well, at least in my eyes).
axod 16y ago
Google should make their own toolbar that continually sends random bad data back to bing to screw up their results. I'd install it.
akshat 16y ago
While this is not completely Black and White, one thing which favours Bing is that a user has clicked on a search result which is determined using his own intelligence. Google has assisted the user with that action. Bing is only correlating these two individual actions(search and click) by the user, to get some additional signals.
jtchang 16y ago
In a way I see this click tracking that Microsoft is doing innovation. What better way to get relevancy than directly from the user and what that user clicks on?
mrnothere 16y ago
As many have pointed out, Google has used clickstream data from their toolbar for a number of years. Also, Google has used the links provided by hub and search pages to find relevant sites within a niche. They have happily indexed links they discovered on those pages, and then removed or penalized the pages that pointed them to it. It's OK, of course, because any SERP not provided by Yahoo Google or Microsoft is termed "spam"

511 points by atularora 16y ago

c2 16y ago

Isn't it bad form from a marketing perspective to continually mention their top competitor? Does Apple mention android so extensively in their press? As Paul said, customers don't care. All they are doing is giving Bing some front and center advertising on it's blog (which has several non-tech readers) and the tech people who actually care probably don't enough to actually switch search engines.

lwhi 16y ago
I think that customers do care a lot of the time. Especially customers of tech companies, who often become evangelists for their chosen platforms and devices. In this case, I don't know how this discussion (verging on disagreement) could occur without mentioning the competition.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
If they mentioned bing in a super bowl commercial I'd agree with you but this is a tech blog. I believe there's a difference in the marketing results between the two.
jedsmith 16y ago
Well, if you notice, they toed the water first. Google didn't fire right off the bat with the hard-hitting blog entry, but instead basically gave a more detailed version of the same thing to Danny Sullivan. They wanted to see how Microsoft would react before going official with it, because even though Microsoft's response was predictable, there's always a chance that Microsoft would have surprised everyone with their response. (They didn't, in my opinion.) What's struck me most about this story as it has developed throughout the day is that Google's actions are very deliberate and planned. I wouldn't consider Google as continually mentioning Bing, either; in fact, I don't think they've paid much attention at all to them. Put Bing in the search box on their official blog, and you'll see that this is the only post specifically about Bing -- a perusal of older posts indicates that the rest are hitting on comments or TrackBacks (i.e., the background image misfeature).

wardrox 16y ago

What a very clever way to test their theory. I'm very curious to see how Microsoft explain this one. Also, why do I now want to buy things with "hiybbprqag" printed on them?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Gibbon 16y ago
It's not really that clever.. it's the search equivalent of a trap street in cartography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

atularora 16y ago

Some perceive Google's stand with hypocrisy e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status/32568646026924032 http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status/3256864602692403...

chc 16y ago
That tweet is drawing a very specious connection. Android did not, as far as I can tell, copy any of Apple's algorithms or piggyback on top of them. It is a novel implementation of some of the same ideas in the iPhone. Similarly, it's plagiarism if you take a Harry Potter book and publish your own version with the names changed, but James Patterson's "Witch & Wizard" has a copyright of its own despite being rather similar in concept. (Edited to remove question about phrasing thanks to atularora's clarification.)
- atularora 16y ago
  standby -> stand. Sorry for the typo
- brown9-2 16y ago
  The tweet author might be referring to recent claims that Android contains non-licensed Sun code.
  - chc 16y ago
    That could be, but it would make even less sense to me. If they're talking about copying Apple, at least they did copy something from Apple, if only an idea. The copyright infringement claims have never been substantiated at all — it's just an accusation.
- ecopoesis 16y ago
  While Android it obviously inspired by iOS, it's not a direct copy. A better example of Google's hypocrisy is their outright copying news articles into Google News despite the source companies asking them not to.

chaosmachine 16y ago

Will any Bing users suddenly switch to Google because of this? Probably not. Will people who've never heard of Bing be reading about them in the paper tomorrow? Yes. Will complaining about competition from underdogs make Google look bad to some? Yes. I don't see how making this a public issue is a win for Google. Seems like something they should have kept in their back pocket. "Keep your enemies closer", as they say.

alecco 16y ago
If the privacy bit is properly reported in MSM, it should definitely raise some concerns. Think corporations with sensible data and all that.
- chaosmachine 16y ago
  The thing is, Google monitors which search results you click, too. Bing's toolbar just does it via browser integration. Google can and does track clicks from Bing via Google Analytics. Every time you click a result on Bing and land on a page using Google Analytics, Google knows about it, and they record your Bing search terms from the referrer. The same is probably true for pages with Google ads.
  - alecco 16y ago
    But as Matt Cutts pointed out, there's a very clear red warning on Google Chrome while IE just silently gives you a very unsuspicious disclaimer.
    - teaspoon 16y ago
      What does Chrome have to do with this mode of tracking? Google Analytics will capture a referrer from any browser that includes it, and no browser that I know of displays a "red warning" when including it.
      - kissickas 16y ago

cookiecaper 16y ago

I think this is silly. Unless Google can come up with a copyright claim on its search results, and I seriously doubt they can, they have nothing to complain about. I use Google's search results too -- information you pump out publicly can be used to the advantage of your customers as well as your competitors. If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them. Accept that freely available information is freely available or clamp down and stop publishing information that might help your competitors. In Google's case, unfortunately, the info that helps Bing is also the info that is essential to Google's customers. I know of some other media companies that are hyper-paranoid about their mass produced, widely disseminated, public content being "stolen" by others, maybe Google should set up a lunch date with the RIAA.

MichaelApproved 16y ago
Your argument is seriously flawed. Just because something is made publicly available doesn't mean it's free and clear for anyone to reproduce. For example, if I don't chain my bike it doesn't mean anyone is allowed to steal it. Taking my bike is still a crime. How I protected it has nothing to do with the criminal act.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Stealing a bike necessarily deprives a person of his property. Copying your competitors when they do something people like is a time-honored tradition and certainly not illegal as long as the copying occurs along certain guidelines. If Bing was scraping Google en masse and just putting a "Bing" interface on it, Google might have something here, but looking at Google's results and deciding they have some better results (and it's unclear if they even did that) and then making sure you have the same "better" results on your page too is not wrong, and deprives no man of his property. This is merely Google whining that Bing is delivering sort of good results because that threatens Google.
  - MichaelApproved 16y ago
    The stealing a bike example goes to counter the parent's argument that they can't complain if they don't protect their content. As to whether this is a crime or not would probably be a copyright issue. If Google had a valid legal claim I bet they'd make it in court.

hasenj 16y ago

I don't see anything wrong Bing is doing. There's clearly an indirect link between the synthetic query and Google result. If Bing was outright stealing Google results, all you have to do is: 1. setup the synthetic queries on Google 2. search for them using Bing Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y. The Bing toolbar has the right to assume there's a relationship between X and Y. It's a legitimate "ranking" strategy.

contextfree 16y ago
"Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y." ... and even then it only worked for 7-9% of "synthetic" nonsense queries.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
The time it took bing to show the results has nothing to do with the fact that they took it from googles result pages. They clearly took the results from google or possibly from another source that took it from google. Bottom line, the results came from google.
- VBprogrammer 16y ago
  In my view this is only a problem if IE8 / Bing Toolbar has a line which is effectively: if current_page == "www.google.com": """ Steal results from competition """ Otherwise, generically applying this on other sites is clever and innovative. Effectively turning every user into a web-crawler with a built in mechanical turk to rank useful links on that page. I think google are framing the debate well, and perhaps exposing something that isn't exactly privacy friendly but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage.
  - moultano 16y ago
    >but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage. If you've denied google access to your site in your robots.txt, then it would be a reasonable claim. (Google has denied bing access in its robots.txt)

seanalltogether 16y ago

Google should proceed with caution, do they really want to get dragged into a debate about tracking user actions to influence search results?

nikster 16y ago
I think there's a very clear ethical divide. Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service. With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page. Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.
- barake 16y ago
  Google clearly stated in their blog post they used IE8 and the Bing toolbar with settings that provide user experience data to MS (for the Suggested Sites feature and such). I'm sure Google's toolbar and Chrome phone home if you let them, too. Unless I'm missing something just running Windows isn't enough for MS to do the kind of data collection Google is claiming.
- davidu 16y ago
  You fail to understand the issue here. None of this stuff is on by default in Windows. You have to install the Bing toolbar.
barista 16y ago
This whole accusation by Google was very childish... and I thought adult supervision was no longer required at Google ;)
- brianobush 16y ago
  Would a lawsuit be better? I think that this is a better problem to be sorted outside of the courts. Too often we rely on courts to solve our problems.

eps 16y ago

What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google...

akavlie 16y ago
Well, Windows doesn't come with grep, so...
- akavlie 16y ago
  Well I guess THAT joke fell flat. Oh well...
callmevlad 16y ago
I imagine it's because they want the Google results as input even (and especially) in cases when there are indeed results.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google... Because what you describe would be underhand and probably a violation of Google's ToS that could cost them very dearly in PR and money (in a court case). They have access to user data that users say they can access (click-through or whatever) but they don't have access to Google search results directly unless Google allow this (which I've not checked but can't imagine they do allow). The grey area is that Google's ToS relates to their relationship with their clients (people who search using Google), do they disallow their clients if they're using MSIE with tracking? Doubtful, if they did (by a technicality say) then they could sue their clients but they couldn't (a priori) sue MS as MS are acting in good faith in their relationship with the same clients (people using MSIE allowing data tracking). The onus would appear to be on the Google users not to have tracking enabled (if indeed Google's ToS disallow such things). Why not just grep Bing logs ... well clearly they can tell a lot about the relevance to a particular term by seeing how long a user spends on a page after searching for that term and following a link. If the user bounces then it's not likely to be high quality. This sort of info won't be easily gathered from Bing logs if indeed it is possible to get at at all.

droz 16y ago

I think they (google) can really only cry foul if there is specific code in the Bing toolbar that targets google's search results. The way that they describe the approach, it seems like the Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo, altavista, ask.com and many others.

mishmash 16y ago
>Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo Isn't Yahoo search powered by Bing anyway?

andrewljohnson 16y ago

Setting aside the ethical questions, because I don't really care, when I look at the probable outcomes of this, I think it's wise for Google to point out what's going on here. This string of stories positions Google as the smart, sciency search engine, and Bing as a collection of hacks. This is how I'd want the public to perceive the battle if I were Google. But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally. As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.

tmsh 16y ago
Yes, but historically this is how Microsoft wins. They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade). I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win. ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso... Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization.... ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
- city41 16y ago
  Yes but when Microsoft took on Apple back in the day, they were young, agile and relevant. The same is much harder to say of the MS of today. They aren't winning very often anymore, especially in the consumer space. And I say this as a Microsoft alum and really enjoyed my time at the company.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago

From http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-... >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 This is actually just IE's "spying" working properly. If an MSIE user that has allowed Microsoft to see their browsing habits follows a link after a search then MS are associating that link. This is sensible as it's measuring actual visits following a given search. If someone searches for a googlewhack and Bing have no results for that term then it's natural that MS would then use this data to associate the googlewhack with the visited page. Initially I thought this sounded like MS being underhand but really they're tracking their users and associating their users search terms with the pages that they visit - _not_ using this data for search (given they have permission) would be silly, no? The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??

narrator 16y ago
>The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings?? You sir, have won the thread.

d0mine 16y ago

It is unclear whether the Google results appear in Bing from the same computer the initial queries were made i.e., it is a personalization of search results or Bing uses that results for other users too.

MichaelApproved 16y ago

Is it possible bing is pulling the results from a third party provider who is doing the cheating? Maybe a middle man is partially whats to blame for the delay in the results.

sdrinf 16y ago

Here's an alternative hypothesis: the bing toolbar might look for explicit search queries (either strings entered into a textbox, or q=, query= parameters), and navigation from such pages to external domains. This would match all "search engines" in the most relaxed meaning of the term: product search, thesaurus, lexicons, dictionaries, everything; and I'd argue to be a legit signal for a "general search engine" to match. (Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first.) If this is the case, Google isn't being picked upon; rather, they are merely the first, who figured this out externally. Cookie for the scientific rigor, but no cigar for the way they PRd the story. Correlation, after all, does not equal causation.

mda 16y ago
Well, while doing this they clearly knew that Google is by far the biggest search engine in the world, and naturally most of the data would be coming directly from Google. Right?
- sdrinf 16y ago
  This, in fact, could be quite wrong. Consider the fact, that most modern websites include a search engine of one form, or another; and the usage graph of the web has an extremely long tail. Even considering the top 100 most visited websites on Alexa: all of them has a search form, and only 20 or so belongs to Google; it's very easy to see how the aggregated usage of the other 80 could be much, much higher, than the aggregated usage of Google properties. Therefore, while Google might be single most impacted organization in the world, most of the data comes from non-google properties. And none of this has anything to do with my original argument of the algorithm itself being benign.
- keeganpoppen 16y ago
  Why does that matter? They're only "stealing" results from Google insofar as people (/Google employees) used Google in order to illustrate what pages they want returned given a certain search query. I have a sneaking suspicion that the exact same thing would have happened if they were in the position to do the same query bombing on Ask Jeeves or crappywebsearch.net as it did for Google. Search engines to me are an obvious case of a means to an end. If a search engine better than Google were to come out tomorrow I would switch to it (from Google) instantly with no regrets. Google's sense of propriety about their results (or, more accurately, what users clicked on after searching via Google), especially given the fact that they are well-known for their penchant for sucking in user data like a black hole (not that I care-- I want them to use it if it means better searches), to me seems 9 parts hypocritical and 1 part prima donna. Need people be reminded that this is the same company that "accidentally" logged users' WiFi browsing habits while driving StreetView cars around Europe? Give me a break. Everyone is guilty, and no one is going to do anything differently now than they did before.

caf 16y ago

"You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank." It's actually more like trap streets on maps.

jeroen 16y ago

These seem to be the relevant parts of MSs responses: "Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites." “We do not copy Google’s results.” I see MS denying _copying_, not denying _using_ Google search results. That makes the title of the Google blog post incorrect.

tristanperry 16y ago

Good for Google. Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.' Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this. I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing). So yeah: good for Google. Bad for Bing.

callmevlad 16y ago

I can only imagine the confusion the Clyde-Findlay Area Credit Union SEO team is going through right now: "Why are we getting so much traffic from people searching for 'delhipublicschool40 chdjob'?"

juddlyon 16y ago
I thought the same thing about Team One Tickets: "Is hiybbprqag some new band the kids like? Why don't we have tickets for them?"

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

BarkMore 16y ago

Google could have made this story all the more interesting by using misspellings of the terms nihilartikel and mountweazel in the honeypot queries.

pedanticfreak 16y ago

Why didn't Google's investigation go further? Why didn't they decompile the IE8 toolbar to figure out what it was really doing? Maybe that's against the DMCA and Google can't admit to it? Having the evidence in code would have made the accusation irrefutable.

jkterhune 16y ago
Agree. I have to imagine that someone at Google captured the toolbar's HTTP traffic. Maybe they're holding it back, or maybe it's the same for Google results as it is for, say, Lycos.

brudgers 16y ago

>"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops" OK, over the course of several weeks 20 google engineers were able to inject 7/100 false searches into Bing's database. That is more structured like a brute force attack than a scientific experiment. Is Google really surprised that SEO works? [edit]The blog contains nothing significant about methodology - no control groups, no restrictions on automation, no limits on methods used. In other words, what this shows is that 20 Google Engineers were able to hack Bing and that they did so for PR purposes.[/edit]

thought_alarm 16y ago

Google developed an impressive spell correction and error detection algorithm to improve their search results. Microsoft inadvertently benefits from Google's research by simply watching and recording how people use Google. The end result is a Microsoft product that isn't as good as its competition, but it's good enough for some people. Sound familiar? It's a classic case of true innovation vs. "Microsoft" innovation.

rome 16y ago

Do I understand this right? Google (over a period of time)knowingly submitted info to Microsoft. When Microsoft used that data, Google accuses them of copying? Does Google use the data I give them? Are they copying me?

txxxxd 16y ago
Close, but you didn't understand it quite right. Google knowingly submitted info to Microsoft to confirm a suspicion that Microsoft was using google.com search results from other users to populate bing results.

aneesh 16y ago

Why do people think there's anything wrong here? Here's a (hypothetical) similar example: In the 1990s, it probably look a lot of iterations, user studies, and market research to decide that copy/paste, undo, etc were the "right" set of features to include in a word processor. Do you think Google Docs re-did all that research? No, of course not. They probably just looked at Word and said, "we need to support these features". And there's nothing wrong with that. This is the exact same thing. If you have a product out in the market, it's fair game for your competitors to look at and analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and use those to improve it's own product.

BoppreH 16y ago
I see it more as copying the toolbar item by item.
j_baker 16y ago
There's a difference between looking at word's copy/paste and deciding you want to make your own and making your copy/paste a hack around Word's copy/paste.

neild 16y ago

The number-one point I take away from this isn't about ethics or what is "right". It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning. They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results. That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.

chucknthem 16y ago
Disclosure: I'm interning in the Bing team at MS but my statements here are mine only and do not reflect that of Microsoft. I don't see how this indicates that they've given up on Bing. They're spending a lot of money on the online services team, even making a loss for the past several quarters to improve Bing. They're playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive while they get their algorithms up to scratch. It's better than the alternative of loosing all their customers/market share and then have no data to help them improve. I see this more as a compliment to Google, even though Google certainly doesn't see it that way, and I can definitely understand their frustration.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  "[Bing is] playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive" Since you're interning in the Bing team, I'll ask: did a lot of people at Bing know about Google's rankings as a data source in Bing? I'll understand if you can't answer, but I'm genuinely curious.
zaidf 16y ago
They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning. Sounds like a very rational position. Anything less could be termed 'delusion' on Microsoft's part. And for the longest time, they were delusion about the search market in general. No longer. They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results. Google being an additional source of data for them does not equal Bing "giving up on bettering Google".

rodh257 16y ago

I'm a bit confused - see this image, from Google Analytics on my blog. http://i.imgur.com/oWK8q.png http://i.imgur.com/oWK8q.png Google Analytics knows that the search term 'autodesk revit devlopers guide' on Bing lead someone to my blog. I take it this information is in the HTTP header on the request to my site which the Google analytics code reads. If Google were to use Google analytics information in their search results, how would that be any different to what Bing is doing? Or is the distinction that Google claims not to do this?

joevandyk 16y ago
The referer is in the http headers. Whereas Bing is using IE toolbars to upload Google search results.
gregable 16y ago
From http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-using-google-analytics-have.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-using-google-anal... "[Google] Search Quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking ... You can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won't affect your ranking within Google Search results." It's dated middle of last year, I guess it's possible that something has changed, but nothing I'm aware of.
- deleted 16y ago
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Matt_Cutts 16y ago
We don't use Google Analytics data in any way in our search rankings. The reason is that we wouldn't want a site's rankings to benefit just because they chose to use Google Analytics.

dfranke 16y ago

More interesting than anything Microsoft is doing here is Google's answer to it. If Microsoft caught Yahoo doing this, they'd bury them in lawyers. Google is confident enough to just go public and take the PR win.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
I guess they gave up the idea of suing because they were unlikely to win. Even if Bing was directly scraping Google's results from Bing's servers, it's iffy because robots.txt is not something that's enforceable, and listings of things are not copyrightable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

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ecopoesis 16y ago

It's funny that Google has a problem with Microsoft using their content (the search rankings), yet has no problem taking content from places TripAdvisor (http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/14/news/tripadvisor-shrugs-off-reports-google-blockade-still-in-place/ http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/14/news/tripadvisor-shrugs-off-...) and newspapers (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fold%2Fcontent%2F2006%2F02%2F6095.ars&ei=jsRITYfAHoiq8Aag6NSsBg&usg=AFQjCNFtRwakdQRICDmGh4YSIRm5xXN1TA&sig2=DPLaZ5dASlNDaZKiEc4O5A http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&s...), even when those companies specifically ask Google to not. Google should be more careful here: either it's OK to repurpose other site's content or it's not, and Google has built their entire business around repurposing content. They shouldn't be surprised when their competitors start doing the same.

deleted 16y ago

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krisrak 16y ago

use hashtag #BingGate

deleted 16y ago

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ot 16y ago

As many others have said, I don't think that using click data from the browser/toolbar as one of thousands signals can be considered "copying". When doing a query with a nonexistent word, all the other signals are zero because there is no knowledge about the query, so the only remaining one is the history of clicks "sniffed" from Google/etc... SERP. OTOH, on real world queries the signal has probably a relatively low weight. I don't think that it is a secret that Bing uses click data from browser/toolbar as a signal, it's just a not well known fact. For example in the paper "Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data" (http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf) by Microsoft Research, they explain how to improve the spelling corrections by using click data from "other search engines".

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
The paper you mentioned appears to be saying that Microsoft is extracting spell corrections via clicks on Google. That's pretty surprising news. I just pulled down the paper and noticed this: "The clickthrough data of the second type consists of a set of query reformulation sessions extracted from 3 months of log files from a commercial Web browser .... In our experiments, we "reverse-engineer" the parameters from the URLs of these sessions, and deduce how each search engine encodes both a query and the fact that a user arrived at a URL by clicking on the spelling suggestion of the query – an important indication that the spelling suggestion is desired" Some of the recent discussion has been about whether Microsoft looks at lots of different sites vs. doing something special or different for Google. This paper very much sounds like Microsoft reverse engineered which specific url parameters on Google corresponded to a spelling correction? Figure 1 of that paper looks like Microsoft is using specific Google url parameters such as "&spell=1" to extract spell corrections from Google. Targeting Google specifically is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places. It looks like you work at Microsoft--can you say any more about this?
- ot 16y ago
  > The paper you mentioned appears to be saying that Microsoft is extracting spell corrections via clicks on Google. Well, no, that's a research paper that says that they have made experiments in that direction, but this doesn't imply that this is currently done in Bing. But it gives an hint about what kind of data is available from the "log files from a commercial Web browser". > Targeting Google specifically is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places. From the article, they have handcrafted rules for both Google and Yahoo, that together with Bing have (I think) the 95% of the market. I'd say they are not targeting Google, they are targeting the majority search engine users. There just happen to be only 3 major search engines, so a few handcrafted regexes are sufficient. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps has handcrafted (or manually tuned) scraping code to extract reviews from Yelp and other major review sites, and same for Google News for the extraction of the news body from the major online news sources. How is this different? > It looks like you work at Microsoft--can you say any more about this? Yeah, I should have been more clear about this. I am interning at MSR and have some involvement with Bing (and actually worked there last year), but my comments are personal and about facts that are public. BTW, IMHO using the click logs can't be considered "copying", more like "a way to discover new sites to crawl and the keywords that lead to them". This is not copying the SERP results. Since it "looks like" you work at Google :) can you answer this question (it was also asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165963 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165963)? Doesn't Google use Chrome to get traffic statistics, through the opt-in "send usage statistics" and the malicious site protection?

ellyagg 16y ago

The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovations of Apple. They organized with Apple's competitors to provide an offering extremely similar in spirit and often in form to what the iDevices do. There is zero chance Android adopts all the "conventions" it has without copying Apple. The world was not on a fast track to full phone, bright screen, touch capacitive displays and gestures and app markets before Apple pioneered them. iPhone was not the logical inevitable implication of the technology that had gone before. If Google thinks Bing is not playing fair, Google has 10x as much to answer for in real damages to Apple for thieving their innovation. Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google. Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.

henryw 16y ago
The degree to which Microsoft is copying Google is to a much higher degree. Google did not do an exact "copy/paste" like Microsoft did here. At least Google did it from scratch.
- gscott 16y ago
  Google started with something, probably by scanning the Yahoo directory and starting from there. If they just pointed Googlebot to one site they would never get the whole web, they had to start from some source with a lot of sites that they could then branch out from.
  - lazugod 16y ago
    And depending on the state of Yahoo's (or Lycos' or Altavista's) robots.txt at the time, that may be defendable.
kemiller 16y ago

dholowiski 16y ago

Did they do the same test with blekko or duckduckgo too? It would be interesting to see if Microsoft is the only one doing this. I would try it now, but the test has been polluted by all of the news articles.

maeon3 16y ago

Google should have kept quiet, and figured out how Microsoft is pulling data from Google. They could then create a script that would cause Bing to link new borrowed content to goatse.

AmazingMe 16y ago
bing only sees, what google's customer are seeing. so Google can't do it without screwing its own search results, and even worse it won't affect top 1 million query strings, as for them bing is getting much stronger signals from other sources.

sliverstorm 16y ago

I may be misunderstanding what is happening, but is it possible Bing is just doing what it was programmed to do- examining the user's browsing habits? Is it necessarily directly and purposely targeting Google?

radicaldreamer 16y ago

This is an excellent short term PR tactic, but Microsoft can just say that they're not copying Google's results, they're just using user click data to improve their search results and that sometimes that click data happens to come from users' google searches. It's understandable why Google's concerned, because it's likely that Microsoft has access to a lot more this data due to their OS and software's ubiquity.

Athtar 16y ago

Seriously? Anybody else surprised at how little data there is given how serious the accusations are? From what I've read, the general consensus seems to be that Microsoft is using IE in conjunction with the Bing toolbar to analyze user's search data. And this is something that worked only on 6 or 7 of the 100 terms that they tried it with? That was enough to incriminate Bing? Google could've at least tested to see if this behavior is limited to just Google or if Bing was also analyzing other search engines (or even other pages). I would've expected MS to have released something like, not Google.

slackgentoo 16y ago

Take a look at feature list here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mslr/feature.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mslr/feature.as... Combing features 130, 131, 135 and 136, I think it is understandable what Google engineers did can give those fake links a boost in the search results. In a way, they cheated the algorithm.

enthalpyx 16y ago

"so Google set up a honeypot – some made up words like [hiybbprqag] linking to random unrelated sites." That's not my understanding of what Google did at all. Google fed back search results for keywords that didn't exist on the Internet -- period, and they started eventually showing up in Bing.

littlestove 16y ago

How about this analogy? If Company A publishes a book and Company B somehow manages to get the content of the book from its readers (with their consent). Then B publishes the same content as if it is original content, how does that sound to you?

mmaunder 16y ago

Well, at least Bing will get a pagerank boost from all the new backlinks in the press coverage.

Natsu 16y ago

They should have made one of the nonsense queries something like "westealourresultsfromothersearchengines" and linked it to something like yes.com just to make the copying easier for non-tech people to understand.

kcdenman 16y ago

Another example like this that has just come out - Qwiki by Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of facebook. The new search engine pulls data for its results directly from Wikipedia and adds it's own flare. The open source text comes directly from Wikipedia. Qwiki - see contents http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_vi_of_the_united_kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_vi_of_the_united_kingdom

kowsik 16y ago

this is brilliant. all those years of "innovation" ruined by a simple MiTM tap.

kowsik 16y ago
http://labs.mudynamics.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-and-omg-you-copied-me/ http://labs.mudynamics.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-and-omg-yo...

jetaries 16y ago

I think this is a very bad move by Google to get into these types of pointless arguments. Google being in the market leader position, there is nothing Google can gain from doing this. Google won't convert Bing users over with these acquisitions, all Google doing is raising awareness for Bing. If anything, Google would lose users to Bing for doing this. If anyone from Google reading this. This is not a smart move, and should be ended asap.

random42 16y ago

Google, you are embarrassing yourself.

bayjinger 16y ago

Think I'll just quote Mike Masnick's post over at techdirt, since he sums it up so well: "For Google to attack a competitor for using open information on the web -- the same way it does -- seems like the height of hypocrisy. It's fine for Google to crawl and index whatever sites it wants in order to set up its ranking algorithms, but the second someone looks at Google's own rankings as part of their own determination, suddenly its "cheating"? This seems like the latest in a series of indications that Google has moved past the innovation stage into the "protecting its turf" stage. That would be a shame." http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110201/11022312911/googles-childish-response-to-microsoft-using-google-to-increase-bing-relevance.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110201/11022312911/google...

kaze1 16y ago

Never mind the ethics part. The fact that Bing's 'signal gathering' mechanism can be fooled into accepting some bogus links, without even an iota of content verification, illustrates a fatal flaw. I am sure developers at MS are capable people, but this throws poor light on them (well, at least in my eyes).

axod 16y ago

Google should make their own toolbar that continually sends random bad data back to bing to screw up their results. I'd install it.

akshat 16y ago

While this is not completely Black and White, one thing which favours Bing is that a user has clicked on a search result which is determined using his own intelligence. Google has assisted the user with that action. Bing is only correlating these two individual actions(search and click) by the user, to get some additional signals.

jtchang 16y ago

In a way I see this click tracking that Microsoft is doing innovation. What better way to get relevancy than directly from the user and what that user clicks on?

mrnothere 16y ago

As many have pointed out, Google has used clickstream data from their toolbar for a number of years. Also, Google has used the links provided by hub and search pages to find relevant sites within a niche. They have happily indexed links they discovered on those pages, and then removed or penalized the pages that pointed them to it. It's OK, of course, because any SERP not provided by Yahoo Google or Microsoft is termed "spam"