4 ms·

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

by 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)
    - VBprogrammer 16y ago
      I don't completely disagree in that perhaps Bing should respect Robots.txt when using information gathered in this way. However, the aim of Robots.txt is to restrict the actions of a automated web-crawler (bandwidth limiting and preventing unwanted interaction with dynamic pages), in this case the crawling is not carried out by a 'robot' so in my opinion there is room for interpretation. I guess its an interesting point, clearly denying access to an area in the robots.txt suggests you do not have permission to use that information. However, only the TOS will be definitive on what you can and cannot do. For example not including a robots.txt file clearly does not waive all rights, but interpreting the TOS is clearly beyond the capability of an automated system. In this case I would suggest the only safe course of action for Bing would be to have an exclude list of domains and allow anyone to have their own site excluded from this information gathering.
- hasenj 16y ago
  So? Bottom line, all search engine results come from somewhere else. When you search for Hacker News, it's not like Google knows what Hacker News is, it grabs the results from else where and ranks them. When there's only one result, it doesn't matter how you rank it, it will always be the only result.
  - 83457 16y ago
    "all search engine results come from somewhere else" I believe the word you are looking for is "interweb".
zyb09 16y ago
Well look, this thing comes preinstalled with Windows, so all the Google engineers did is go to www.google.com on IE, search for something and - voila a short time later the results are on bing.com. Automated spidering or not, the way this is setup borders on the edge of stealing. I can see why they feel the need to complain about the issue.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  The Bing toolbar doesn't come preinstalled with Windows.
  - txxxxd 16y ago
    IE will send this data even without the toolbar.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Link? I haven't heard this mentioned yet.
      - txxxxd 16y ago
        It's in the blog post: "Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature"
        kenjackson 16y ago
        That's different data though. I thought you meant the Google search data.
- qjz 16y ago
  That's not all they did: We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar. Essentially, the engineers enabled the user tracking features of IE and the Bing Toolbar, ultimately seeding Bing with the desired results. How is that stealing? On a related note, can this technique be exploited to improve site ranking on Bing?

by hasenj 16y ago

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)
  - VBprogrammer 16y ago
    I don't completely disagree in that perhaps Bing should respect Robots.txt when using information gathered in this way. However, the aim of Robots.txt is to restrict the actions of a automated web-crawler (bandwidth limiting and preventing unwanted interaction with dynamic pages), in this case the crawling is not carried out by a 'robot' so in my opinion there is room for interpretation. I guess its an interesting point, clearly denying access to an area in the robots.txt suggests you do not have permission to use that information. However, only the TOS will be definitive on what you can and cannot do. For example not including a robots.txt file clearly does not waive all rights, but interpreting the TOS is clearly beyond the capability of an automated system. In this case I would suggest the only safe course of action for Bing would be to have an exclude list of domains and allow anyone to have their own site excluded from this information gathering.
hasenj 16y ago
So? Bottom line, all search engine results come from somewhere else. When you search for Hacker News, it's not like Google knows what Hacker News is, it grabs the results from else where and ranks them. When there's only one result, it doesn't matter how you rank it, it will always be the only result.
- 83457 16y ago
  "all search engine results come from somewhere else" I believe the word you are looking for is "interweb".

zyb09 16y ago

Well look, this thing comes preinstalled with Windows, so all the Google engineers did is go to www.google.com on IE, search for something and - voila a short time later the results are on bing.com. Automated spidering or not, the way this is setup borders on the edge of stealing. I can see why they feel the need to complain about the issue.

kenjackson 16y ago
The Bing toolbar doesn't come preinstalled with Windows.
- txxxxd 16y ago
  IE will send this data even without the toolbar.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Link? I haven't heard this mentioned yet.
    - txxxxd 16y ago
      It's in the blog post: "Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature"
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        That's different data though. I thought you meant the Google search data.
qjz 16y ago
That's not all they did: We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar. Essentially, the engineers enabled the user tracking features of IE and the Bing Toolbar, ultimately seeding Bing with the desired results. How is that stealing? On a related note, can this technique be exploited to improve site ranking on Bing?