11 ms·

What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Binggate)

234 points by user24 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
haberman 16y ago
> At first I thought there could be three possible explanations to Google’s handling of this situation: I think he forgot option 5: whether Bing intentionally copied Google's search results or not, if Bing continues this practice then their index will contain a de facto copy of Google's index for tricky queries. Bing will inherit Google's spelling correction, it's long tail, its top results, and any other enhancements Google develops to return more relevant results. Google invests so much into these things; if Bing absorbs these improvements without lifting a finger, Google loses its ability to stay ahead through technical merit and innovation. I think Amit is telling the truth: "And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
- knowtheory 16y ago
  I think i would put it more succinctly this way: Bing and it's boosters have been touting their search engine results as better and more relevant than Google's. As it turns out, the reason for that, is because they are tracking all of Google's results without reporting that they are doing so. Additionally, the article posted here is disingenuous. There is a difference between tracking general click tracking, and what bing is doing, which is scraping queries and click results. That is not a general browsing feature, this is a search engine specific feature, designed to benefit off of the results provided by others.
  - dave777 16y ago
    How do you know its the former and not the other. Google's experiment doesn't discriminate between the two.
    - grhino 16y ago
      Does the Bing toolbar algorithm associate all query string parameters with the subsequent click action? Or did the Bing algorithm toolbar have code that specifically targeted click actions on the Google search engine? Was it just the top result that was copied or were more of the results copied as well?
    - knowtheory 16y ago
      Sorry you're right. The other possibility is that bing is scraping the query term and all of the links out of the search page, and correlating them immediately. That means they're totally susceptible to google bombing (which is in effect what google did). The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.
      - radicaldreamer 16y ago
        Even if they are susceptible to Google bombing, I don't think Google would reduce the quality of it's results for real searches because of this. Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.
        msg 16y ago
        They're not just susceptible to Google bombing. They are at the mercy of some easy to automate SEO with the bing toolbar installed. If I were a black hat I'd install the bing toolbar, craft some perhaps human looking Selenium code, and start the clicking. Over a period of a few weeks I'd be owning the top results in Bing.
        timtim 16y ago
        I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.
- user24 16y ago
  Sure. As Harry Shum said; this is a new kind of clickfraud. Just like when googlebombing become a public technique, Google would have been foolish not to change the behaviour of their algorithm. I'd be amazed if Bing didn't swiftly change their click tracking behaviour to explicitly blacklist google. And if Google had waited for Bing to reply privately before making any of this public, I'm sure we'd have avoided all this drama.
- ecopoesis 16y ago
  It's nice that Google would like Microsoft to stop copying them. Everyone else who generates unique content (news site articles, TripAdvisor reviews) would like Google to stop copying their content into Google News and Google Places. Apparently Google only cares about sites copying other sites content when their it's their own stuff getting copied.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Any site that wants Google to stop copying their content to Google news can ask Google news to stop doing so. It's very simple.
    - pyre 16y ago
      The real issue is that they don't want their content in Google News, but they also don't want to kill the golden goose that is directing traffic to their site. I.e. Google News is generating traffic for them, but they don't want the content to be on Google News either. They want to have their cake and eat it too. edit: 'they' here refers to the old media newspapers, more specifically to Mr. Murdoch.
    - ecopoesis 16y ago
      There's a big difference between copying content and linking to content. I don't think anyone has a problem with Google linking to them: that is after all the purpose of a search engine. But Google doesn't just link, they copy full content into their site, giving users no reason to click through to the original creator. And Google doesn't let creators opt-out of just the content-stealing part of their scheme. If you want to be indexed by Google, you have to allow them to copy whatever they want from your site. And no one can actually opt-out because Google is a monopoly in search. So they get away with it, stealing pageviews from content creators.
  - txxxxd 16y ago
    Most sites are very happy to have traffic from Google. Those that aren't can simply configure robots.txt.
- kulkarnic 16y ago
  I don't think this is as unethical as you say. I sincerely believe all Bing is doing is using the toolbar to get (long) search trails. Using search trails is a near-standard practice--to guess intent, find deep links, yada yada. Does Google want Bing to special-case links going out from their site? Or all search-engines maybe? What about techniques like this? http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf The paper authors sure call it innovative, not cheating :) (Also, techniques like this search+wrapper are great for Product Search, and I'd be surprised if Google doesn't use them). I think Google's stance is rather unfair. While Bing may have "copied" results, I feel this was just a side-effect of trying to build a good index, rather than a case of "oooh.... let's see what's google returns for this, and just copy the result").
- greyman 16y ago
  I disagree with you and agree with the author of the blog post. Microsoft is not copying Google's search results, rather, they use behaviour of their Bing toolbar users as one signal for their own ranking. And, if clicking through the Google SERPs was the only signal for certain made up search term, then it appears like copying the Google's results. But technically it's not.
  - AndreiVajnaII 16y ago
    I wonder if this can be tested somehow, just like Google did.
jdp23 16y ago
Very good post. I'd like to suggest another explanation: they really ''do'' see what Microsoft is doing as cheating, and expect others to share their outrage. When you're "in the bubble", talking only with people who share your perspective, it's easy to believe everybody things they way you do. And Google's known for being smarter than everybody else when it comes to search, so at some level people there probably believe that the only way anybody could get results as good as they are is by cheating.
- uxnjmad 16y ago
  A bubble like Microsoft Research for instance? The comments on this subject seem very polarised and it is interesting to look at the background of the commenters.
  - jdp23 16y ago
    Yes, although in some ways MSR is less in the bubble than the rest of the company -- people go to conferences and are aware of what's happening elsewhere. Microsoft's bubble applies just as much here as Google's: I'm sure a lot of folks there can't understand why Google or anybody else would think there's anything wrong with what they did here. When bubbles collide. My charter back in 2006-7 was "game-changing strategies", which meant getting people to think outside the bubble. So we did a lot of work analyzing Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's corporate culture. One of the things that's core to Google's identity is preferring algorithms to anything that has to do with people, and that's very much on display with Binggate.
contextfree 16y ago
OK, out of curiosity I actually tried installing the Bing bar (on IE9 beta, which, btw, makes you manually activate add-ins after they're installed. The installer for the addin itself is pretty upfront about it sending your click data and stuff - it's right there on the one and only options page, next to one of three checkboxes - though the box is checked by default which I think is dubious). I haven't been able to influence the Bing search results (no surprise there, since I've only spent a few minutes on it and not weeks like the Google folks) but one thing I did find very interesting was that if you search for something on another site, the Bing bar actually lights up and populates its own search field with your query so that with another click you can search for it on Bing. As far as I can tell, the bar doesn't seem to be using any heuristic to tell what is a search query but just has a list of sites/URL patterns it knows about. Besides Google and Bing itself, these include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Ask.com, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MSDN and IMDB, but not Twitter or DuckDuckGo. This doesn't prove anything about how it's feeding search results of course but it does at least suggest that the Bing bar is very interested specifically in search queries, though not only on Google.
pak 16y ago
My first thought was that it was click data, and not outright copying. If a bunch of Google employees with Bing toolbar start clicking on links to some made-up term, that should spike the data enough to change results within a few weeks. How can Google positively rule that out without internal knowledge of how Bing works?
- user24 16y ago
  With a control. Launch a fake search engine with similar spiked results but with no traceable connection to Google. If the results only show up on Bing from google-clicks and not from clicks on the control, then it's a good indicator that Bing have Google-specific code. Then run the test a few more times with greater than 100 queries (which in SE land is a miniscule test set). From what they've said, it seems like they only tested against fake clicks on google.com. That tells us Bing are using click data but nothing more. This is a pretty simple debugging technique, which is why I'm shocked if Google didn't think to do that. I really wish I wasn't the one saying this, wish I didn't have these doubts. But I can come to no other conclusion than the ones I've outlined in the post.
  - pak 16y ago
    That sort of "control" wouldn't necessarily be conclusive; Bing could be using click data weighed by a prior calculation of how trustworthy the clicked-on site is (e.g. an analogue of PageRank score), whereupon clicks on Google would rank much higher than clicks on some newly-created fake search engine. I guess my point is, unless you have deep knowledge into the secret workings of a search engine with hundreds of inputs, simple "tests" to figure out the nature of just one of those inputs are bound to end in multiple plausible explanations for your results, unless you rig a huge fraction of the WWW. And Google has better things to do with their time.
  - jsnell 16y ago
    If you can't come up with any other conclusion, I'm not sure you're really sorry about having those doubts. Here's a few alternatives off the top of my head: 0. There might or might not have been a control group, but its results didn't matter since: 0a) the whole purpose of revealing this was to make sure that blackhat SEOs could start abusing the system, and MS would thus be forced to stop doing it. 0b) the whole purpose of revealing this was to shame MS into stopping the practice, and for that purpose it didn't matter whether the system was specific or generic. 0c) describing the full experimental setup and the gazillion things that were tested would just have distracted from the core story 1. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism wasn't generic, it just wasn't mentioned because: 1a) it was held back as a gotcha in case Microsoft started lying about what the system actually did. 1b) positive evidence from the control group couldn't actually prove anything, it'd be suggestive at best. 2. There was no need for an explicit control group since: 2a) they actually observed the network traffic of the toolbar, and it only sent the relevant information for Google and not other sites. 2b) they disassembled the toolbar and found out it had Google-specific code related to this. 3. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism was generic, but: 3a) they thought that the the mechanism being generic didn't matter, and what MS were doing was still equally dodgy. 3b) they thought that MS would not be keen on trying out a "oh no, it's not just Google whose algorithms we're leeching off when spying on users, it's every other site too" PR strategy. I have no idea of what actually happened. In all likelihood it was something not listed here, since these were just random ideas. But at least I think many of them are way more plausible than the silly "maverick super-senior engineers botch the job, leak a flawed story, PR coverup follows" theory.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- jbri 16y ago
  Do you seriously think that a copycat service beating out and killing off the actual source of innovation is somehow a good thing?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - jbri 16y ago
      In case you missed it, innovation is expensive. If a copycat service can immediately clone the innovator's work and provide the exact same service, then they are likely to outcompete them, because they have much smaller costs. To suggest that such freeloading should be encouraged removes any incentive to try and innovate in such areas.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
        jbri 16y ago
        You make something innovative, truck along carving out your niche for a few years, then a big company rips off your system and uses its massive marketing budget to crush you. Does not getting to massive-multinational stage in a few years mean you've done something wrong? Or are you suggesting that it's only okay because they're doing this to Google instead of a little guy?
        recoiledsnake 16y ago
        It's not necessarily a bad thing. That's what happened to the original IBM PC and it made PCs cheaper and led to the PC revolution. Did it suck for IBM and Apple? Yes, but the benefit to the world was immense.
gfodor 16y ago
I have a feeling there is more to this story than meets the eye. Either Google did more tests then they mention on the blog and proved irrefutably that Bing is literally scraping their results, or there's some underlying political stuff going on that we're not privy to.
- ars 16y ago
  Never mind about proving it - google isn't even saying it. It's not scraping, it's click tracking.
moultano 16y ago
If it were just click data, how would they get the terms? They're either parsing the query out of the url, or violating robots.txt to fetch the result page, almost certainly the former. This seems like a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google. It's theoretically plausible that they are treating all query parameters the same for all sites, but very unlikely given how much noise that would introduce into their results. Even so, they would have to know that most clicks with meaningful query parameters come from Google. This isn't something that's going to happen by accident.
- brudgers 16y ago
  Twenty Google engineers were charged with getting Bing to hit the honeypots and given several weeks to do so. Balancing the oddity of the query terms with the level of resources Google threw into the operation, I'm not sure if 7/100 is impressive SEO or unimpressive. What I do know is that the original suspicious result for "torsoraphy" is returned by Wikimedia's search algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraphy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraph...
  - Tiomaidh 16y ago
    No, Wikipedia admin Nihiltres intentionally created the "torsoraphy" page (at 3:03 today, no less) and made it redirect to "Tarsorrhaphy". It's not the search algorithm being clever. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Torsoraphy&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Torsoraphy&act...
- bigiain 16y ago
  "a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google" - just like pretty much every piece of web analytic software since awstats has done for over 10 years, right? To imagine that _any_ half serious search engine isn't special-casing any referrer information it can get it's hands on from the top half of http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites is surely naive?
- nikster 16y ago
natmaster 16y ago
Finally some sense in all this.
robobenjie 16y ago
The article was interesting, but using Google and Bing as plurals really disorients me. I had to stop and mentally substitute every time he said something like "Google are thinking".
- mikeklaas 16y ago
  That's standard practice in the UK when referring to companies.
  - user24 16y ago
    thanks, I was beginning to wonder if I was 'right' or not. Didn't know the standard was singular in US.
- kj12345 16y ago
  I think it's just the British English way of referring to companies or groups with plural verbs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
  - will_critchlow 16y ago
    Huh. I'm British and I would always use singular for a company (not for sports teams necessarily ref: that wiki link). Are we really supposed to say "Google are having an earnings call on Tuesday"? I would say "Google is having an earnings call on Tuesday".
- epo 16y ago
  They're using the company name as a collective noun or as shorthand for "people at company X or product Y", makes sense to me (a Brit).
storborg 16y ago
Can't someone just analyze the Bing toolbar binary and figure out what's actually going on here?
- _flag 16y ago
  The Bing toolbar only sends information back to Microsoft, it doesn't decide what to do with it. For this kind of a task it would be simpler to use a packet sniffer anyway.
  - storborg 16y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Does the toolbar send a notification to Microsoft on every click? Or only clicks on Google SERPs?
- user24 16y ago
  The data's sent back via SSL, from what I've read, and disassembling is not going to be practical.
  - amalcon 16y ago
    On the other hand, if it uses the OS HTTPS infrastructure, someone could probably add a root cert to IE and "MitM" themselves. If it doesn't, it's just a matter of finding and replacing the key; while that's not completely straightforward, it is done. Darn, now it's really tempting to fire up some VMs. I don't have time for that.
kj12345 16y ago
Really interesting comment at Reddit about what Google might be thinking: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bing_is_cheating_copying_our_search_results/c1f1bvx http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bi... Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  The Reddit commentator appears to be operating on the idea that trap streets and the like are copyrightable under US law, which is a fairly common urban legend. In reality adding a fake "fact" to a collection of real facts does not allow you to sue someone if they copy the fake fact along with the real facts; from the decision in Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., treating "'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    In Europe there are specific database IP rights. Re the decision you cite it seems to be spurious. The notion of whether the data is factual or not is irrelevant. Was the presentation copied? >would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact Unless they actual did some work and checked the facts rather than making a slavish, infringing, copy of someone else's work. >If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated" For limited terms of never (not limited enough mind you but nonetheless limited). This is interesting though - if you can copy facts with impunity then can't I copy the "fact" of the score for Katy Perry's Firework for example?
- tzs 16y ago
  The guy's phone book example is wrong, though. Putting fake entries in a phone book does not make it subject to copyright. Google or Bing for "Feist vs. Rural Telephone" for the leading case in the US on this.
zacharypinter 16y ago
I think the key to all of this lies in the code for the bing toolbar (and the code that parses its data). If I search twitter for "binggate" then click on a link, the referrer would be: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries, and it'd be a novel way to gain a lot of information from private indexes (stack overflow, twitter, lucene/solr setups, reddit, etc). If this is what Bing is doing, then kudos to them for clever thinking, no foul play. However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax, or if they're filtering and correlating google.com URLs against their own algorithms, then it's copying and foul play. The surprising thing here is how much publicity Google's giving the issue knowing that Microsoft could shoot them down in no time with a few code snippets (if there's no foul play going on).
- drivebyacct2 16y ago
  > It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries vs >However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax So they're either generically copying from ANY search engine, or they're specifically copying from Google. Either way, the perception and actual outcome is the same. I'm not sure either is inherently good or bad, but I'm surprised that there is such a delineation in peoples' minds.
  - jdp23 16y ago
    Excellent point. When I solve problems like this, I usually wound up with a general purpose solution and then test it out and if necessary optimize for important cases.
  - zacharypinter 16y ago
    Interesting. Take a site-specific search index like the one that reddit uses. Such an index can prioritize by votes, comments, users, fine-tuned spam filters, and so on. A search engine specifically optimized for reddit has a lot more information available when returning links than a generic web crawler ever could. If Bing came up with a generic way to leverage site-specific search engines and help drive traffic to those sites, is that still perceived with negative connotations?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
neutronicus 16y ago
Google's outrage seems silly to me. They made a fortune harvesting other people's judgments on relevant webpages. That's what PageRank is. So Microsoft takes their search results - it's all in the game! And Google wrote the rules!
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Well gosh, developing ever more elaborate versions of the algorithm must have cost them tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars over the years. How the hell are they supposed to cover that kind of expense with just billions of dollars per quarter?
- user24 16y ago
  and take a look at inline dictionary definitions, page previews, images - the entire business is based on 'copying' other people's info. My question was genuine - what are you thinking, google?
- luigi 16y ago
  But this is a matter of core functionality. Bing should not be using clickstream data from Google searches as a signal. The core offering of Google search is getting used by its competitor, without any citation. Yes, it's a side effect of the Bing bar's clickstream tracking, but it's still an observable, quantifiable effect. It’s like if Developer A takes Developer B's code and passes it off as his own work without any citation. Does it matter if it was malicious or incidental? Not really, it's still wrong. And if Developer A gets caught doing it, he should own up to his mistake and fix it.
  - neutronicus 16y ago
    The way I see it, it's like if B builds entire applications by pasting snippets from Stack Overflow without citation, and then pitches a holy fit upon realizing that one of his/her amalgamations of Stack Overflow snippets has in turn been cut and pasted. The boundary just seems arbitrary to me, which makes the whole thing seem hypocritical.
  - 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
izendejas 16y ago
Whether it's wrong or not, it does make you wonder where Google's priorities are. How much time (cumulatively) did they spend on this and could they have spent this time improving their algorithms instead? Maybe it took a few hours, but still.
ig1 16y ago
I think the biggest question here is, if a site robots.txt file prohibits bots from gathering data, should that also prohibit bots that piggyback on real user sessions ?
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >if a site robots.txt file prohibits bots from gathering data, Pages in a robots.txt file still get put into Google's index they just don't get parsed. Surprised me to find that out; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt (see "Why Meta Robots is better than robots.txt").
- user24 16y ago
  Good question. robots.txt was designed for an age before ajax and the proliferation of plugins/toolbars/etc. It's a valid shortcoming you've identified, imho.
- RobGR 16y ago
  I think it's an interesting question, but I think it will be technically difficult to differentiate between a person using data (say, with a plugin that indexes everything they browse, or a separate program that indexes their browser cache) and something like the Bing toolbar.
- lazugod 16y ago
  Agreed. That ambiguity is why Google's PR response makes sense.
b0b0b0b 16y ago
I like to imagine that the bing algorithms are so smart, that it realizes the preciousness of the signal in clicktrack-logged visits to websites with a referrer "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. This single feature is given so much weight that bing unintentionally gives the appearance of wholesale google duplication.
mukyu 16y ago
Why does he think that Google were not aware of the clickstream data when they set up (several) experiments where they specifically install what they thought were sources for the clicks and then purposefully clicked?
aaronsw 16y ago
This piece is so bogus. If, as he suggests, Google's query data is accidentally getting caught up in some larger Bing project, then why doesn't Bing just say that in their numerous posts and tweets about the scandal? Instead, they've just thrown mud at Google.
melling 16y ago
9/10 desktops run Windows and IE still has almost 60% market share, despite being much worse than Firefox or Chrome (yes IE9 is a huge improvement). Microsoft could do a lot of damage to Google by leveraging their desktop monopoly. I think Google has around 70% search market share, but they're easily replaceable. By the time the courts sort it out, the damage will be done.
javanix 16y ago
Can we please, please, PLEASE not call this Binggate? Not everything needs a pithy one-word term of endearment.
- paulrademacher 16y ago
  Bingapocalypse? Oh wait, that's still one word.
muyyatin 16y ago
Is the next push in SEO to pay users to navigate from search results or other sites to your site?
trezor 16y ago
I honestly don't get the controversy of this thing. Let's say Microsoft via its bing-toolbar is checking what pages people are visiting, what search term they are using on various sites (including google) and what they deem are the most useful results of these queries, and incorporating this into their search engine. Is this really so bad? As it stands, Google is collecting this data about you almost everywhere on the internet, even if you use google or not. Besides straight Google search, think websites which uses Google's CDN for stuff like jQuery, Google analytics, etc etc. Google is everywhere and they are collecting data to incorporate in their search and ad-platform from everyone. End of story. Heck, with google instant and their new JS-based search-gui you can't even get the referer information on your own website to see what search terms lead your users to your site. You now have to use Google analytics to get that information, and in getting that information you are helping Google even further in tracking everything everyone is doing on the internet. WTH? Relatively speaking, is really Microsoft the bad guy here?
pluc 16y ago
It's okay for MS to parse user input through it's toolbar, fine. However, it's not okay for Microsoft (or anyone) to use that toolbar to figure out what response any given server sends in reply to any kind of requests - unless it's part of a documented feature. You're only seeing the part where Microsoft is grabbing user input and not the part where Microsoft is grabbing Google data.
xaei 16y ago
it's tangentially interesting that the number 2 result on bing for 'google' is a washington post semi-hit-piece regarding spam. google's results for 'bing' contain marginally less transparent attacks .
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I think Google is right to be upset here. Google's biggest asset is their search results and Microsoft's response seems tepid at best. Effectively MS is claiming that they don't scrape google search results, instead they merely constructed an automated device which essentially does exactly that. If Bing doesn't see what's wrong with that then they are not terribly smart.
user24 16y ago
I've written a followup post addressing some of the common reactions to my first: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/02/what-are-google-thinking-part-2/ http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/02/what-are-google-thinking-... On HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169690
s_jambo 16y ago
I'm surprised google didn't just use this to poison the results.
known 16y ago
http://www.google.com/xml http://www.google.com/xml is wrong
jyanez 16y ago
I just tried what the blog said and it's simply not happening.
jyanez 16y ago
I'm in Venezuela and it just didn't happened, I've parse HTML results from Google a couple of times and Google discriminates results from Address IP, Browser and Languague. So far, I think it's pretty wrong to say something like this without being 100% sure.

234 points by user24 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

> At first I thought there could be three possible explanations to Google’s handling of this situation: I think he forgot option 5: whether Bing intentionally copied Google's search results or not, if Bing continues this practice then their index will contain a de facto copy of Google's index for tricky queries. Bing will inherit Google's spelling correction, it's long tail, its top results, and any other enhancements Google develops to return more relevant results. Google invests so much into these things; if Bing absorbs these improvements without lifting a finger, Google loses its ability to stay ahead through technical merit and innovation. I think Amit is telling the truth: "And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

knowtheory 16y ago
I think i would put it more succinctly this way: Bing and it's boosters have been touting their search engine results as better and more relevant than Google's. As it turns out, the reason for that, is because they are tracking all of Google's results without reporting that they are doing so. Additionally, the article posted here is disingenuous. There is a difference between tracking general click tracking, and what bing is doing, which is scraping queries and click results. That is not a general browsing feature, this is a search engine specific feature, designed to benefit off of the results provided by others.
- dave777 16y ago
  How do you know its the former and not the other. Google's experiment doesn't discriminate between the two.
  - grhino 16y ago
    Does the Bing toolbar algorithm associate all query string parameters with the subsequent click action? Or did the Bing algorithm toolbar have code that specifically targeted click actions on the Google search engine? Was it just the top result that was copied or were more of the results copied as well?
  - knowtheory 16y ago
    Sorry you're right. The other possibility is that bing is scraping the query term and all of the links out of the search page, and correlating them immediately. That means they're totally susceptible to google bombing (which is in effect what google did). The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.
    - radicaldreamer 16y ago
      Even if they are susceptible to Google bombing, I don't think Google would reduce the quality of it's results for real searches because of this. Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.
      - msg 16y ago
        They're not just susceptible to Google bombing. They are at the mercy of some easy to automate SEO with the bing toolbar installed. If I were a black hat I'd install the bing toolbar, craft some perhaps human looking Selenium code, and start the clicking. Over a period of a few weeks I'd be owning the top results in Bing.
        timtim 16y ago
        I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.
user24 16y ago
Sure. As Harry Shum said; this is a new kind of clickfraud. Just like when googlebombing become a public technique, Google would have been foolish not to change the behaviour of their algorithm. I'd be amazed if Bing didn't swiftly change their click tracking behaviour to explicitly blacklist google. And if Google had waited for Bing to reply privately before making any of this public, I'm sure we'd have avoided all this drama.
ecopoesis 16y ago
It's nice that Google would like Microsoft to stop copying them. Everyone else who generates unique content (news site articles, TripAdvisor reviews) would like Google to stop copying their content into Google News and Google Places. Apparently Google only cares about sites copying other sites content when their it's their own stuff getting copied.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Any site that wants Google to stop copying their content to Google news can ask Google news to stop doing so. It's very simple.
  - pyre 16y ago
    The real issue is that they don't want their content in Google News, but they also don't want to kill the golden goose that is directing traffic to their site. I.e. Google News is generating traffic for them, but they don't want the content to be on Google News either. They want to have their cake and eat it too. edit: 'they' here refers to the old media newspapers, more specifically to Mr. Murdoch.
  - ecopoesis 16y ago
    There's a big difference between copying content and linking to content. I don't think anyone has a problem with Google linking to them: that is after all the purpose of a search engine. But Google doesn't just link, they copy full content into their site, giving users no reason to click through to the original creator. And Google doesn't let creators opt-out of just the content-stealing part of their scheme. If you want to be indexed by Google, you have to allow them to copy whatever they want from your site. And no one can actually opt-out because Google is a monopoly in search. So they get away with it, stealing pageviews from content creators.
- txxxxd 16y ago
  Most sites are very happy to have traffic from Google. Those that aren't can simply configure robots.txt.
kulkarnic 16y ago
I don't think this is as unethical as you say. I sincerely believe all Bing is doing is using the toolbar to get (long) search trails. Using search trails is a near-standard practice--to guess intent, find deep links, yada yada. Does Google want Bing to special-case links going out from their site? Or all search-engines maybe? What about techniques like this? http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf The paper authors sure call it innovative, not cheating :) (Also, techniques like this search+wrapper are great for Product Search, and I'd be surprised if Google doesn't use them). I think Google's stance is rather unfair. While Bing may have "copied" results, I feel this was just a side-effect of trying to build a good index, rather than a case of "oooh.... let's see what's google returns for this, and just copy the result").
greyman 16y ago
I disagree with you and agree with the author of the blog post. Microsoft is not copying Google's search results, rather, they use behaviour of their Bing toolbar users as one signal for their own ranking. And, if clicking through the Google SERPs was the only signal for certain made up search term, then it appears like copying the Google's results. But technically it's not.
- AndreiVajnaII 16y ago
  I wonder if this can be tested somehow, just like Google did.

jdp23 16y ago

Very good post. I'd like to suggest another explanation: they really ''do'' see what Microsoft is doing as cheating, and expect others to share their outrage. When you're "in the bubble", talking only with people who share your perspective, it's easy to believe everybody things they way you do. And Google's known for being smarter than everybody else when it comes to search, so at some level people there probably believe that the only way anybody could get results as good as they are is by cheating.

uxnjmad 16y ago
A bubble like Microsoft Research for instance? The comments on this subject seem very polarised and it is interesting to look at the background of the commenters.
- jdp23 16y ago
  Yes, although in some ways MSR is less in the bubble than the rest of the company -- people go to conferences and are aware of what's happening elsewhere. Microsoft's bubble applies just as much here as Google's: I'm sure a lot of folks there can't understand why Google or anybody else would think there's anything wrong with what they did here. When bubbles collide. My charter back in 2006-7 was "game-changing strategies", which meant getting people to think outside the bubble. So we did a lot of work analyzing Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's corporate culture. One of the things that's core to Google's identity is preferring algorithms to anything that has to do with people, and that's very much on display with Binggate.

contextfree 16y ago

OK, out of curiosity I actually tried installing the Bing bar (on IE9 beta, which, btw, makes you manually activate add-ins after they're installed. The installer for the addin itself is pretty upfront about it sending your click data and stuff - it's right there on the one and only options page, next to one of three checkboxes - though the box is checked by default which I think is dubious). I haven't been able to influence the Bing search results (no surprise there, since I've only spent a few minutes on it and not weeks like the Google folks) but one thing I did find very interesting was that if you search for something on another site, the Bing bar actually lights up and populates its own search field with your query so that with another click you can search for it on Bing. As far as I can tell, the bar doesn't seem to be using any heuristic to tell what is a search query but just has a list of sites/URL patterns it knows about. Besides Google and Bing itself, these include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Ask.com, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MSDN and IMDB, but not Twitter or DuckDuckGo. This doesn't prove anything about how it's feeding search results of course but it does at least suggest that the Bing bar is very interested specifically in search queries, though not only on Google.

pak 16y ago

My first thought was that it was click data, and not outright copying. If a bunch of Google employees with Bing toolbar start clicking on links to some made-up term, that should spike the data enough to change results within a few weeks. How can Google positively rule that out without internal knowledge of how Bing works?

user24 16y ago
With a control. Launch a fake search engine with similar spiked results but with no traceable connection to Google. If the results only show up on Bing from google-clicks and not from clicks on the control, then it's a good indicator that Bing have Google-specific code. Then run the test a few more times with greater than 100 queries (which in SE land is a miniscule test set). From what they've said, it seems like they only tested against fake clicks on google.com. That tells us Bing are using click data but nothing more. This is a pretty simple debugging technique, which is why I'm shocked if Google didn't think to do that. I really wish I wasn't the one saying this, wish I didn't have these doubts. But I can come to no other conclusion than the ones I've outlined in the post.
- pak 16y ago
  That sort of "control" wouldn't necessarily be conclusive; Bing could be using click data weighed by a prior calculation of how trustworthy the clicked-on site is (e.g. an analogue of PageRank score), whereupon clicks on Google would rank much higher than clicks on some newly-created fake search engine. I guess my point is, unless you have deep knowledge into the secret workings of a search engine with hundreds of inputs, simple "tests" to figure out the nature of just one of those inputs are bound to end in multiple plausible explanations for your results, unless you rig a huge fraction of the WWW. And Google has better things to do with their time.
- jsnell 16y ago
  If you can't come up with any other conclusion, I'm not sure you're really sorry about having those doubts. Here's a few alternatives off the top of my head: 0. There might or might not have been a control group, but its results didn't matter since: 0a) the whole purpose of revealing this was to make sure that blackhat SEOs could start abusing the system, and MS would thus be forced to stop doing it. 0b) the whole purpose of revealing this was to shame MS into stopping the practice, and for that purpose it didn't matter whether the system was specific or generic. 0c) describing the full experimental setup and the gazillion things that were tested would just have distracted from the core story 1. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism wasn't generic, it just wasn't mentioned because: 1a) it was held back as a gotcha in case Microsoft started lying about what the system actually did. 1b) positive evidence from the control group couldn't actually prove anything, it'd be suggestive at best. 2. There was no need for an explicit control group since: 2a) they actually observed the network traffic of the toolbar, and it only sent the relevant information for Google and not other sites. 2b) they disassembled the toolbar and found out it had Google-specific code related to this. 3. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism was generic, but: 3a) they thought that the the mechanism being generic didn't matter, and what MS were doing was still equally dodgy. 3b) they thought that MS would not be keen on trying out a "oh no, it's not just Google whose algorithms we're leeching off when spying on users, it's every other site too" PR strategy. I have no idea of what actually happened. In all likelihood it was something not listed here, since these were just random ideas. But at least I think many of them are way more plausible than the silly "maverick super-senior engineers botch the job, leak a flawed story, PR coverup follows" theory.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jbri 16y ago
Do you seriously think that a copycat service beating out and killing off the actual source of innovation is somehow a good thing?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - jbri 16y ago
    In case you missed it, innovation is expensive. If a copycat service can immediately clone the innovator's work and provide the exact same service, then they are likely to outcompete them, because they have much smaller costs. To suggest that such freeloading should be encouraged removes any incentive to try and innovate in such areas.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
      - jbri 16y ago
        You make something innovative, truck along carving out your niche for a few years, then a big company rips off your system and uses its massive marketing budget to crush you. Does not getting to massive-multinational stage in a few years mean you've done something wrong? Or are you suggesting that it's only okay because they're doing this to Google instead of a little guy?
        recoiledsnake 16y ago
        It's not necessarily a bad thing. That's what happened to the original IBM PC and it made PCs cheaper and led to the PC revolution. Did it suck for IBM and Apple? Yes, but the benefit to the world was immense.

gfodor 16y ago

I have a feeling there is more to this story than meets the eye. Either Google did more tests then they mention on the blog and proved irrefutably that Bing is literally scraping their results, or there's some underlying political stuff going on that we're not privy to.

ars 16y ago
Never mind about proving it - google isn't even saying it. It's not scraping, it's click tracking.

moultano 16y ago

If it were just click data, how would they get the terms? They're either parsing the query out of the url, or violating robots.txt to fetch the result page, almost certainly the former. This seems like a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google. It's theoretically plausible that they are treating all query parameters the same for all sites, but very unlikely given how much noise that would introduce into their results. Even so, they would have to know that most clicks with meaningful query parameters come from Google. This isn't something that's going to happen by accident.

brudgers 16y ago
Twenty Google engineers were charged with getting Bing to hit the honeypots and given several weeks to do so. Balancing the oddity of the query terms with the level of resources Google threw into the operation, I'm not sure if 7/100 is impressive SEO or unimpressive. What I do know is that the original suspicious result for "torsoraphy" is returned by Wikimedia's search algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraphy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraph...
- Tiomaidh 16y ago
  No, Wikipedia admin Nihiltres intentionally created the "torsoraphy" page (at 3:03 today, no less) and made it redirect to "Tarsorrhaphy". It's not the search algorithm being clever. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Torsoraphy&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Torsoraphy&act...
bigiain 16y ago
"a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google" - just like pretty much every piece of web analytic software since awstats has done for over 10 years, right? To imagine that _any_ half serious search engine isn't special-casing any referrer information it can get it's hands on from the top half of http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites is surely naive?
nikster 16y ago

natmaster 16y ago

Finally some sense in all this.

robobenjie 16y ago

The article was interesting, but using Google and Bing as plurals really disorients me. I had to stop and mentally substitute every time he said something like "Google are thinking".

mikeklaas 16y ago
That's standard practice in the UK when referring to companies.
- user24 16y ago
  thanks, I was beginning to wonder if I was 'right' or not. Didn't know the standard was singular in US.
kj12345 16y ago
I think it's just the British English way of referring to companies or groups with plural verbs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
- will_critchlow 16y ago
  Huh. I'm British and I would always use singular for a company (not for sports teams necessarily ref: that wiki link). Are we really supposed to say "Google are having an earnings call on Tuesday"? I would say "Google is having an earnings call on Tuesday".
epo 16y ago
They're using the company name as a collective noun or as shorthand for "people at company X or product Y", makes sense to me (a Brit).

storborg 16y ago

Can't someone just analyze the Bing toolbar binary and figure out what's actually going on here?

_flag 16y ago
The Bing toolbar only sends information back to Microsoft, it doesn't decide what to do with it. For this kind of a task it would be simpler to use a packet sniffer anyway.
- storborg 16y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Does the toolbar send a notification to Microsoft on every click? Or only clicks on Google SERPs?
user24 16y ago
The data's sent back via SSL, from what I've read, and disassembling is not going to be practical.
- amalcon 16y ago
  On the other hand, if it uses the OS HTTPS infrastructure, someone could probably add a root cert to IE and "MitM" themselves. If it doesn't, it's just a matter of finding and replacing the key; while that's not completely straightforward, it is done. Darn, now it's really tempting to fire up some VMs. I don't have time for that.

kj12345 16y ago

Really interesting comment at Reddit about what Google might be thinking: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bing_is_cheating_copying_our_search_results/c1f1bvx http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bi... Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.

msbarnett 16y ago
The Reddit commentator appears to be operating on the idea that trap streets and the like are copyrightable under US law, which is a fairly common urban legend. In reality adding a fake "fact" to a collection of real facts does not allow you to sue someone if they copy the fake fact along with the real facts; from the decision in Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., treating "'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  In Europe there are specific database IP rights. Re the decision you cite it seems to be spurious. The notion of whether the data is factual or not is irrelevant. Was the presentation copied? >would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact Unless they actual did some work and checked the facts rather than making a slavish, infringing, copy of someone else's work. >If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated" For limited terms of never (not limited enough mind you but nonetheless limited). This is interesting though - if you can copy facts with impunity then can't I copy the "fact" of the score for Katy Perry's Firework for example?
tzs 16y ago
The guy's phone book example is wrong, though. Putting fake entries in a phone book does not make it subject to copyright. Google or Bing for "Feist vs. Rural Telephone" for the leading case in the US on this.

zacharypinter 16y ago

I think the key to all of this lies in the code for the bing toolbar (and the code that parses its data). If I search twitter for "binggate" then click on a link, the referrer would be: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries, and it'd be a novel way to gain a lot of information from private indexes (stack overflow, twitter, lucene/solr setups, reddit, etc). If this is what Bing is doing, then kudos to them for clever thinking, no foul play. However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax, or if they're filtering and correlating google.com URLs against their own algorithms, then it's copying and foul play. The surprising thing here is how much publicity Google's giving the issue knowing that Microsoft could shoot them down in no time with a few code snippets (if there's no foul play going on).

drivebyacct2 16y ago
> It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries vs >However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax So they're either generically copying from ANY search engine, or they're specifically copying from Google. Either way, the perception and actual outcome is the same. I'm not sure either is inherently good or bad, but I'm surprised that there is such a delineation in peoples' minds.
- jdp23 16y ago
  Excellent point. When I solve problems like this, I usually wound up with a general purpose solution and then test it out and if necessary optimize for important cases.
- zacharypinter 16y ago
  Interesting. Take a site-specific search index like the one that reddit uses. Such an index can prioritize by votes, comments, users, fine-tuned spam filters, and so on. A search engine specifically optimized for reddit has a lot more information available when returning links than a generic web crawler ever could. If Bing came up with a generic way to leverage site-specific search engines and help drive traffic to those sites, is that still perceived with negative connotations?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

neutronicus 16y ago

Google's outrage seems silly to me. They made a fortune harvesting other people's judgments on relevant webpages. That's what PageRank is. So Microsoft takes their search results - it's all in the game! And Google wrote the rules!

jacques_chester 16y ago
Well gosh, developing ever more elaborate versions of the algorithm must have cost them tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars over the years. How the hell are they supposed to cover that kind of expense with just billions of dollars per quarter?
user24 16y ago
and take a look at inline dictionary definitions, page previews, images - the entire business is based on 'copying' other people's info. My question was genuine - what are you thinking, google?
luigi 16y ago
But this is a matter of core functionality. Bing should not be using clickstream data from Google searches as a signal. The core offering of Google search is getting used by its competitor, without any citation. Yes, it's a side effect of the Bing bar's clickstream tracking, but it's still an observable, quantifiable effect. It’s like if Developer A takes Developer B's code and passes it off as his own work without any citation. Does it matter if it was malicious or incidental? Not really, it's still wrong. And if Developer A gets caught doing it, he should own up to his mistake and fix it.
- neutronicus 16y ago
  The way I see it, it's like if B builds entire applications by pasting snippets from Stack Overflow without citation, and then pitches a holy fit upon realizing that one of his/her amalgamations of Stack Overflow snippets has in turn been cut and pasted. The boundary just seems arbitrary to me, which makes the whole thing seem hypocritical.
- 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

izendejas 16y ago

Whether it's wrong or not, it does make you wonder where Google's priorities are. How much time (cumulatively) did they spend on this and could they have spent this time improving their algorithms instead? Maybe it took a few hours, but still.

ig1 16y ago

I think the biggest question here is, if a site robots.txt file prohibits bots from gathering data, should that also prohibit bots that piggyback on real user sessions ?

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>if a site robots.txt file prohibits bots from gathering data, Pages in a robots.txt file still get put into Google's index they just don't get parsed. Surprised me to find that out; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt (see "Why Meta Robots is better than robots.txt").
user24 16y ago
Good question. robots.txt was designed for an age before ajax and the proliferation of plugins/toolbars/etc. It's a valid shortcoming you've identified, imho.
RobGR 16y ago
I think it's an interesting question, but I think it will be technically difficult to differentiate between a person using data (say, with a plugin that indexes everything they browse, or a separate program that indexes their browser cache) and something like the Bing toolbar.
lazugod 16y ago
Agreed. That ambiguity is why Google's PR response makes sense.

b0b0b0b 16y ago

I like to imagine that the bing algorithms are so smart, that it realizes the preciousness of the signal in clicktrack-logged visits to websites with a referrer "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. This single feature is given so much weight that bing unintentionally gives the appearance of wholesale google duplication.

mukyu 16y ago

Why does he think that Google were not aware of the clickstream data when they set up (several) experiments where they specifically install what they thought were sources for the clicks and then purposefully clicked?

aaronsw 16y ago

This piece is so bogus. If, as he suggests, Google's query data is accidentally getting caught up in some larger Bing project, then why doesn't Bing just say that in their numerous posts and tweets about the scandal? Instead, they've just thrown mud at Google.

melling 16y ago

9/10 desktops run Windows and IE still has almost 60% market share, despite being much worse than Firefox or Chrome (yes IE9 is a huge improvement). Microsoft could do a lot of damage to Google by leveraging their desktop monopoly. I think Google has around 70% search market share, but they're easily replaceable. By the time the courts sort it out, the damage will be done.

javanix 16y ago

Can we please, please, PLEASE not call this Binggate? Not everything needs a pithy one-word term of endearment.

paulrademacher 16y ago
Bingapocalypse? Oh wait, that's still one word.

muyyatin 16y ago

Is the next push in SEO to pay users to navigate from search results or other sites to your site?

trezor 16y ago

I honestly don't get the controversy of this thing. Let's say Microsoft via its bing-toolbar is checking what pages people are visiting, what search term they are using on various sites (including google) and what they deem are the most useful results of these queries, and incorporating this into their search engine. Is this really so bad? As it stands, Google is collecting this data about you almost everywhere on the internet, even if you use google or not. Besides straight Google search, think websites which uses Google's CDN for stuff like jQuery, Google analytics, etc etc. Google is everywhere and they are collecting data to incorporate in their search and ad-platform from everyone. End of story. Heck, with google instant and their new JS-based search-gui you can't even get the referer information on your own website to see what search terms lead your users to your site. You now have to use Google analytics to get that information, and in getting that information you are helping Google even further in tracking everything everyone is doing on the internet. WTH? Relatively speaking, is really Microsoft the bad guy here?

pluc 16y ago

It's okay for MS to parse user input through it's toolbar, fine. However, it's not okay for Microsoft (or anyone) to use that toolbar to figure out what response any given server sends in reply to any kind of requests - unless it's part of a documented feature. You're only seeing the part where Microsoft is grabbing user input and not the part where Microsoft is grabbing Google data.

xaei 16y ago

it's tangentially interesting that the number 2 result on bing for 'google' is a washington post semi-hit-piece regarding spam. google's results for 'bing' contain marginally less transparent attacks .

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I think Google is right to be upset here. Google's biggest asset is their search results and Microsoft's response seems tepid at best. Effectively MS is claiming that they don't scrape google search results, instead they merely constructed an automated device which essentially does exactly that. If Bing doesn't see what's wrong with that then they are not terribly smart.

user24 16y ago

I've written a followup post addressing some of the common reactions to my first: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/02/what-are-google-thinking-part-2/ http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/02/what-are-google-thinking-... On HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169690

s_jambo 16y ago

I'm surprised google didn't just use this to poison the results.

known 16y ago

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

jyanez 16y ago

I just tried what the blog said and it's simply not happening.

jyanez 16y ago

I'm in Venezuela and it just didn't happened, I've parse HTML results from Google a couple of times and Google discriminates results from Address IP, Browser and Languague. So far, I think it's pretty wrong to say something like this without being 100% sure.