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It matters because if you use your main competitors results and ranking to change your results and ranking, you can no longer claim you are original, innnovativ

by mda 16y ago

It matters because if you use your main competitors results and ranking to change your results and ranking, you can no longer claim you are original, innnovative or better. It just taints everything you did.

keeganpoppen 16y ago
They didn't use either. Certainly not the ranking. Also, you're obviously better if you do-- in fact, you're better by definition. :) (innovative and original, perhaps not so much) Why does the user's click from the results page suddenly belong to Google (apart from the fact that in this specific case they actually artificially created a fake long-tail result)? If I Google Bing, and then Bing's ranking of Bing goes up a a result (not that it's not already #1, but whatever), can you actually say that it's Google's result and ranking? What if it's nytimes, or any number of extraordinarily common searches where you're really just doing a domain lookup for a name you already know? What if I didn't click on anything until the 30th page of results because that was the only useful result, and it causes the Bing rank to go higher? Does Google have any ownership over the rank then, even if the useful page was ranked lower than much more useful results? Couldn't Google then just return a list of every page on the internet in response to every query and then claim that their results are being stolen? To be honest, I'm not really convinced that either side is in the right here. I just think that it should be made clear that there is a large distinction between stealing results and tracking clickthrough behavior. One would be laughably shortsided and of dubious ethics, the other is basically common practice, and is being made a bit more than it is because of its superficial appearance.
- mda 16y ago
  They definitely used results from Google. They use results for terms users entered to Google to crawl pages that are not in their index (torsorophy example which is not an artificial one) therefore enriching their index based on google's results, incresing their depth. As for ranking, it is more blurry, but When you record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking, it starts stinking.
  - budgi3 16y ago
    Google use Google Toolbar to record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking.

by mda 16y ago

keeganpoppen 16y ago

They didn't use either. Certainly not the ranking. Also, you're obviously better if you do-- in fact, you're better by definition. :) (innovative and original, perhaps not so much) Why does the user's click from the results page suddenly belong to Google (apart from the fact that in this specific case they actually artificially created a fake long-tail result)? If I Google Bing, and then Bing's ranking of Bing goes up a a result (not that it's not already #1, but whatever), can you actually say that it's Google's result and ranking? What if it's nytimes, or any number of extraordinarily common searches where you're really just doing a domain lookup for a name you already know? What if I didn't click on anything until the 30th page of results because that was the only useful result, and it causes the Bing rank to go higher? Does Google have any ownership over the rank then, even if the useful page was ranked lower than much more useful results? Couldn't Google then just return a list of every page on the internet in response to every query and then claim that their results are being stolen? To be honest, I'm not really convinced that either side is in the right here. I just think that it should be made clear that there is a large distinction between stealing results and tracking clickthrough behavior. One would be laughably shortsided and of dubious ethics, the other is basically common practice, and is being made a bit more than it is because of its superficial appearance.

mda 16y ago
They definitely used results from Google. They use results for terms users entered to Google to crawl pages that are not in their index (torsorophy example which is not an artificial one) therefore enriching their index based on google's results, incresing their depth. As for ranking, it is more blurry, but When you record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking, it starts stinking.
- budgi3 16y ago
  Google use Google Toolbar to record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking.