9 ms·

Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

182 points by HardyLeung 16y ago

gildur 16y ago
Google makes money out of being the #1 search engine. Concurrence from others is one thing. Concurrence from someone stealing your source code (open source or not) is a whole different story. That should be reason enough, in my humble opinion.
- gildur 16y ago
  Oh I obviously misunderstood the article. I'm so sorry.
- access_denied 16y ago
  You mean competition, not concurrence. use dictionary, HN will upvote. :-)
geuis 16y ago
I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half. Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property. Google has spent billions of dollars in manpower and physical capacity in order to be able to do that. Also, each and every one of those sites can very easily say "don't index me" with a simple robot.txt file on their site. Some do, most don't, because most sites find it valuable for Google to index them. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to compete in the same space as Google. They are also spending lots of money and manpower to build their search engine. But, by using Google's search results to improve their own product, they are acting as a parasite. Google gets no benefit from Microsoft using their data. So to sum up my own summary: Google is a mass symbiote, Microsoft is a parasite.
- axod 16y ago
  Also websites can opt-out of having their content indexed. How can Google opt-out of having its search index copied by Microsoft? The funniest argument in this has been "Bing hasn't got the data, Google has an unfair advantage etc" as if Microsoft didn't exist before Google. Microsoft have had years headstart to get their online division doing something worthwhile, but they still can't get it right.
  - kevin_morrill 16y ago
    Put up a terms of use or force users to accept a license agreement. They do no such thing today. So I think you'd have a hard time saying Microsoft has done anything legally wrong here.
    - axod 16y ago
      They've done as much legally wrong as bundling IE with windows. It's most certainly morally wrong. I want to see a project started to r/e the bing toolbar, and create something to send rubbish data back to bing to screw up their search index. That'd be awesome to see.
    - ericd 16y ago
      We're discussing morality, not legality. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
    - jamesgeck0 16y ago
      Google already has terms of service. You agree to them by using Google. http://www.google.com/accounts/ http://www.google.com/accounts/ 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
va_coder 16y ago
This is starting to get interesting. Google makes money aggregating other people's content. What happens when people aggregate Google's content? What's fair?
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Explain what you mean when you say that Google makes money by aggregating other people's content? Google makes money by indexing other people's content and driving traffic to other people's sites. That hardly seems like a bad thing.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    Google News is an aggregator, hence Rupert Murdoch's problem with it.
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      Google doesn't make any money off of Google News.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - maglob 16y ago
        Maybe not directly, but I am quite sure that Google uses Google News to enhance search results (they know more about you and your interest), and so indirectly makes money.
  - nhebb 16y ago
    http://books.google.com http://books.google.com is considered one of the more egregious examples, with many authors and publicists having complained about Google taking samples of the content and posting it online. I did a Google search a while back on a graphics issue, and got the answer I needed from a Google book search result. You could argue (as Google does) that they are really just helping promote the book. But I have no need too buy - I got the answer for free.
tristanperry 16y ago
Hmm. It might just be me, but I get the feeling that they aren't exactly fans of Google?!
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  They're fans of Apple. It's the guy from Appleinsider writing and Google is clearly considered to be an enemy of Apple.
- latch 16y ago
  Which doesn't make his point less or more valid. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean you can't provide insight and valid opinions about it.
sajidnizami 16y ago
First article I've read in a while that's taking Microsoft's side in the whole situation. Every paragraph of this screams publicity. I am just wondering here if this is a PR tactic. Here I would be happy to see a balanced review of both companies behavior but this is just one sided bashing. <quote>Shame on your pretentious, obnoxious, indefensibly egregious double standard in the field of using public information to turn a profit.</quote> <<-- Ironically, Bing is doing the same and unlike content creators who can opt out by putting a robots.txt file Google cannot opt out of this because like it or not toolbar is always sending back information. Google indexes public content but how it aggregates it and displays it is their deed. The ordering, etc is Google's work not content creators.Copying it is just like copying an IP. I would love to see this go to court and be fought.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I think that the Phineas Barnum assumption is pretty much valid and this article proves it.
Joakal 16y ago
http://www.google.com/robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt First two lines: User-agent: * Disallow: /search
- user24 16y ago
  except that that's not what robots.txt is for. Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt edit: bing toolbar is effectively an extension for MSIE. robots.txt is designed to stop spiders. Spiders aren't extensions. Therefore that's not what robots.txt is for. What did I say wrong to get downvoted?
  - patrickas 16y ago
    >Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt I think that's what most people though was wrong in your comment. Care to elaborate on how an adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt in that fictive scenario?
    - user24 16y ago
      If extensions checked to see if they had permission to alter/interfere/access webpages by looking it up in robots.txt, which is what is being suggested by people who say "Bing toolbar violated robots.txt", then that same mechanism could be used to specify: User-Agent:adblock Disallow: / Or even, if the "User-Agent: (star)" is supposed to tell Bing Toolbar not to play about with the page, then why doesn't that also apply to all your other extensions/addon/BHO's/plugins whatever you want to call them?
      - lukeschlather 16y ago
        It should, if they're sending data back to the mothership. Alexa's toolbar among others should respect robots.txt
- patio11 16y ago
  There is no robot involved. An actual human instructs their user agent to retrieve a document on Google. A piece of code, running in that user agent, does something. If anyone has a complaint here, it is the user, not Google. (Google really really doesn't want to spin this as "MS is spying on our users" because as soon as they say that some person is going to point out "Google is spying on the entire world" and that person will be right.)
to 16y ago
you have to read between the lines. i think googles engineers are just pissed after doing all the work and research to 100% proof that they mimic (mimic, copy, clone, imitate but "stealing" is the wrong word here) the results and bing/MS is just ignorant denying it like a HUGE asshole. its easy to proof that im right with that because there are only individuals yelling at each other, its not like google is filling for a law suit against bing for stealing company strategies or whatever a clever lawyer could come up with.
iqster 16y ago
I had to reread the original Google article to verify a point. The signal Bing is alleged to be using is that users CLICKED on the result that came up ... not the results that just came up first in Google upon a search query. And these are users who agreed to install the Bing toolbar! Here's a hypothesis. I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. This might explain why their "honeypot-take" rate was only 8%. This is a subtle point. So ... imagine if you are the coder who wrote this signal collection feature. Would you capture "term in search box,next URL clicked" OR would you capture "if search box search engine == BING or Yahoo or something else then capture term in search box, next URL clicked". Let me propose an alternative experiment. The test clickers should have clicked on the second or third (or some position N where N > 1) link. This would have demonstrated if Bing is using the actual click information or the search results themselves directly. The former seems completely fair on Bing's part. The latter might be debatable. My point is this ... the Google geniuses fail to distinct these two cases and are muddling it up for the PR drones. This waste everyone's time and productivity. Moreover, they belittle the hard-work of engineers and scientists. It is sad that this is what it has come to.
- jamesgeck0 16y ago
  From your comment: I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. From the official Google blog: We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted.
  - dangrossman 16y ago
    The search text is in the referring URL no matter where it was typed in. It's captured without ever looking at Google.
tallanvor 16y ago
I find it amusing that Dilger mentions Overture, which bought alltheweb from FAST in 2003. FAST, of course, was later acquired by Microsoft in 2008. The number of connections among the major search companies is rather amusing, if not necessarily surprising.
coffeemug 16y ago
Oh jeez, not again. This is the Microsoft we know and love to hate, less so now that it is falling apart and must be pitied as an underdog. Let's see: Market cap: Microsoft - 239.49B, Google - 195.50B. Revenue: Microsoft - 66.69B, Google - 29.32B. Profit margin: Microsoft - 30.84%, Google - 29.01%. Falling apart. Right...
- andrenotgiant 16y ago
  All it took to piece together the author's ignorance was the "Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of “Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),” quote down at the end. I'm sure his line of thought was: "All my friends at Starbucks have MacBook Pros, so Microsoft must be doing really badly." Probably the same reason half his argument seemed to involve Android jealousy...
  - j79 16y ago
    Goodness, your comment seems to imply you have an issue with Apple products, their policies, and/or Steve Jobs. Yeah, the guy writes about OS X and Apple, but he's been a tech consultant for nearly two decades. He's worked with various technologies, from various companies. A quick Google search (heh) would have revealed this. Or, what? Did you believe he was some 20-something year old blogger regurgitating the same "FUD" you believe all Apple fanboys are spewing regarding their "Android jealousy"?
- megablast 16y ago
  Microsoft is still a behemoth, with its fingers in a lot of pies, but unlike Apple and Google, it has not manage to grab onto the future, yet. The future if going mobile, and services. Microsoft has so far lost the mobile race, and the big services do not use MS servers. They are looking in the worst shape to face the future than they have ever, in the last 20 years.
  - greyman 16y ago
    I partially agree, but with some caveats: 1. Future is also in the games, and here Microsoft has a very competitive product (xbox/kinect) 2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android). It just came late to the game, but it is not yet clear if too late. I personally think they can catch up with throwing enough money into it. 3. We will see when they release OS for tablets. They are late here as well, but similar to point 2), maybe not too late.
known 16y ago
Microsoft did nothing wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking
1010011010 16y ago
http://createasearchengine.appspot.com http://createasearchengine.appspot.com
fosk 16y ago
I have a feeling that people's reaction on this is biased by the fact that one of the two companies is Microsoft. What happened here it's not ethically correct, but come on guys, we must be honest. This is business, it's about billions, it's about market shares. It's not a news that money is not ethical. Google collects data too, Google does its own shit like everybody else, like Microsoft. Google has its own toolbar too. And all this story seems more a marketing move against Bing. What I want now to happen is to have more competition, instead of crying Google should work hard to be unbeatable and competitive. History teaches us a copy it's never better than the original.
zerd 16y ago
Dilger first asks "Bing is using Google's search results to improve its own. But what’s wrong with that?" If Bing uses Google's search results, then we effectively only have one major search engine. Yahoo has switched to the Bing engine, and Bing gets a big chunk of it's results from Google. So we have a search engine monopoly. That's wrong with that. > "This is the company that indexes blogs [...], and then makes all this information available without consent" He first asks what's wrong with Bing copying Google's results, because it's public content, then says it's immoral to index public content. Double morals? Logic fail?
- tree_of_item 16y ago
  Where did he say it is immoral to index public content? Google complains about Bing using public content. Google uses public content. Snarky question? Fail?
napierzaza 16y ago
Not really. If Google wants to publicly shame Microsoft it can and is. They're basically saying that Bing is the new "Let me Google that for you". Since they're not currently proceeding with legal motions it's basically just a smear campaign to make people think twice about Bing. And there's truth to it.
andrewcooke 16y ago
Imagine a playground. Young, pre-alpha nerds writhing in chaos. Little arms flailing. Faces red. "Poopy face". "Your mommy smells". Nerd fight.
tnorthcutt 16y ago
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the article switches back and forth between serif and sans-serif font?
- droz 16y ago
  Nope. Just you.
ddemchuk 16y ago
The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.
- SeanLuke 16y ago
  > when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, http://yelp.com/robots.txt http://yelp.com/robots.txt Not a mention of GoogleBot.
  - ddemchuk 16y ago
    well, they're presented with either 1) killing their organic search traffic by blocking Google or 2) allowing the crawlers but not being able to stop their data from being aggregated and included in local results. Yelp's API specifically says their data cannot be aggregated with other sources. When presented with that, Google simply said they weren't using the API, they were scraping. Apparently scraping is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want if you're Google.
tungwaiyip 16y ago
I'll try to make my point again. There is one school of thinking that Google is profiting by farming information from the Internet, literally on the back of many people's labor. You can prove this by running a "Google Sting", that is known as "Google bombing". By having many people setting up honeypot to link an arbitrary keyword to certain URL, you seem to be able to fool Google to artifically associate such keyword with the URL, thus "proving" Google is profiting from your labor. I don't really buy this logic. But Google's accusation of Bing steal from them seems very close to this line of framing.
earl 16y ago
Responding to merely two points, one hopes Daniel isn't as stupid as his writing. "This is the company that indexes blogs, newspapers, and both digital and physical books, and then makes all this information available without consent in the contexts of its ads and paid search space, and is dismissal of anyone who objects to Google’s ultra liberal sense of copyright. " robots.txt and noindex http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... And "Install the Google Toolbar and do a search of Bing, and Google actually directs your clickstream back for its own analysis" Google/Matt Cutts have been very open about what they do and don't use that information for, and they aren't using click tracking.
zohebv 16y ago
I think Google is being disingenuous with their "bing is copying my data" story. However, please avoid linking to roughlydrafted.com. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I just wanted to point out that if you have read any of the material on the site, you will know that it is just full of flamebait articles with an absurd Apple fixation. Everything Android does is copying Apple. Everything Microsoft does is wrong and stupid. If flash is not supported on iPhone it is because it is the morally correct thing to do. When Apple announced the iPhone without an SDK roughlydrafted called developers stupid for asking for an SDK and that javascript on the web is the new SDK. This post however takes the cake, you must side with Bing because Google is a greater threat to Apple than Microsoft. Seriously, how does Overture even enter into this discussion. It is tiresome to see this site linked to all over the web.

182 points by HardyLeung 16y ago

Google makes money out of being the #1 search engine. Concurrence from others is one thing. Concurrence from someone stealing your source code (open source or not) is a whole different story. That should be reason enough, in my humble opinion.

gildur 16y ago
Oh I obviously misunderstood the article. I'm so sorry.
access_denied 16y ago
You mean competition, not concurrence. use dictionary, HN will upvote. :-)

geuis 16y ago

I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half. Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property. Google has spent billions of dollars in manpower and physical capacity in order to be able to do that. Also, each and every one of those sites can very easily say "don't index me" with a simple robot.txt file on their site. Some do, most don't, because most sites find it valuable for Google to index them. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to compete in the same space as Google. They are also spending lots of money and manpower to build their search engine. But, by using Google's search results to improve their own product, they are acting as a parasite. Google gets no benefit from Microsoft using their data. So to sum up my own summary: Google is a mass symbiote, Microsoft is a parasite.

axod 16y ago
Also websites can opt-out of having their content indexed. How can Google opt-out of having its search index copied by Microsoft? The funniest argument in this has been "Bing hasn't got the data, Google has an unfair advantage etc" as if Microsoft didn't exist before Google. Microsoft have had years headstart to get their online division doing something worthwhile, but they still can't get it right.
- kevin_morrill 16y ago
  Put up a terms of use or force users to accept a license agreement. They do no such thing today. So I think you'd have a hard time saying Microsoft has done anything legally wrong here.
  - axod 16y ago
    They've done as much legally wrong as bundling IE with windows. It's most certainly morally wrong. I want to see a project started to r/e the bing toolbar, and create something to send rubbish data back to bing to screw up their search index. That'd be awesome to see.
  - ericd 16y ago
    We're discussing morality, not legality. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
  - jamesgeck0 16y ago
    Google already has terms of service. You agree to them by using Google. http://www.google.com/accounts/ http://www.google.com/accounts/ 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

va_coder 16y ago

This is starting to get interesting. Google makes money aggregating other people's content. What happens when people aggregate Google's content? What's fair?

InclinedPlane 16y ago
Explain what you mean when you say that Google makes money by aggregating other people's content? Google makes money by indexing other people's content and driving traffic to other people's sites. That hardly seems like a bad thing.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  Google News is an aggregator, hence Rupert Murdoch's problem with it.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    Google doesn't make any money off of Google News.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - maglob 16y ago
      Maybe not directly, but I am quite sure that Google uses Google News to enhance search results (they know more about you and your interest), and so indirectly makes money.
- nhebb 16y ago
  http://books.google.com http://books.google.com is considered one of the more egregious examples, with many authors and publicists having complained about Google taking samples of the content and posting it online. I did a Google search a while back on a graphics issue, and got the answer I needed from a Google book search result. You could argue (as Google does) that they are really just helping promote the book. But I have no need too buy - I got the answer for free.

tristanperry 16y ago

Hmm. It might just be me, but I get the feeling that they aren't exactly fans of Google?!

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
They're fans of Apple. It's the guy from Appleinsider writing and Google is clearly considered to be an enemy of Apple.
latch 16y ago
Which doesn't make his point less or more valid. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean you can't provide insight and valid opinions about it.

sajidnizami 16y ago

First article I've read in a while that's taking Microsoft's side in the whole situation. Every paragraph of this screams publicity. I am just wondering here if this is a PR tactic. Here I would be happy to see a balanced review of both companies behavior but this is just one sided bashing. <quote>Shame on your pretentious, obnoxious, indefensibly egregious double standard in the field of using public information to turn a profit.</quote> <<-- Ironically, Bing is doing the same and unlike content creators who can opt out by putting a robots.txt file Google cannot opt out of this because like it or not toolbar is always sending back information. Google indexes public content but how it aggregates it and displays it is their deed. The ordering, etc is Google's work not content creators.Copying it is just like copying an IP. I would love to see this go to court and be fought.

rbanffy 16y ago
I think that the Phineas Barnum assumption is pretty much valid and this article proves it.

Joakal 16y ago

http://www.google.com/robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt First two lines: User-agent: * Disallow: /search

user24 16y ago
except that that's not what robots.txt is for. Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt edit: bing toolbar is effectively an extension for MSIE. robots.txt is designed to stop spiders. Spiders aren't extensions. Therefore that's not what robots.txt is for. What did I say wrong to get downvoted?
- patrickas 16y ago
  >Otherwise your adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt I think that's what most people though was wrong in your comment. Care to elaborate on how an adblock extension could be excluded via robots.txt in that fictive scenario?
  - user24 16y ago
    If extensions checked to see if they had permission to alter/interfere/access webpages by looking it up in robots.txt, which is what is being suggested by people who say "Bing toolbar violated robots.txt", then that same mechanism could be used to specify: User-Agent:adblock Disallow: / Or even, if the "User-Agent: (star)" is supposed to tell Bing Toolbar not to play about with the page, then why doesn't that also apply to all your other extensions/addon/BHO's/plugins whatever you want to call them?
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      It should, if they're sending data back to the mothership. Alexa's toolbar among others should respect robots.txt
patio11 16y ago
There is no robot involved. An actual human instructs their user agent to retrieve a document on Google. A piece of code, running in that user agent, does something. If anyone has a complaint here, it is the user, not Google. (Google really really doesn't want to spin this as "MS is spying on our users" because as soon as they say that some person is going to point out "Google is spying on the entire world" and that person will be right.)

to 16y ago

you have to read between the lines. i think googles engineers are just pissed after doing all the work and research to 100% proof that they mimic (mimic, copy, clone, imitate but "stealing" is the wrong word here) the results and bing/MS is just ignorant denying it like a HUGE asshole. its easy to proof that im right with that because there are only individuals yelling at each other, its not like google is filling for a law suit against bing for stealing company strategies or whatever a clever lawyer could come up with.

iqster 16y ago

I had to reread the original Google article to verify a point. The signal Bing is alleged to be using is that users CLICKED on the result that came up ... not the results that just came up first in Google upon a search query. And these are users who agreed to install the Bing toolbar! Here's a hypothesis. I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. This might explain why their "honeypot-take" rate was only 8%. This is a subtle point. So ... imagine if you are the coder who wrote this signal collection feature. Would you capture "term in search box,next URL clicked" OR would you capture "if search box search engine == BING or Yahoo or something else then capture term in search box, next URL clicked". Let me propose an alternative experiment. The test clickers should have clicked on the second or third (or some position N where N > 1) link. This would have demonstrated if Bing is using the actual click information or the search results themselves directly. The former seems completely fair on Bing's part. The latter might be debatable. My point is this ... the Google geniuses fail to distinct these two cases and are muddling it up for the PR drones. This waste everyone's time and productivity. Moreover, they belittle the hard-work of engineers and scientists. It is sad that this is what it has come to.

jamesgeck0 16y ago
From your comment: I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. From the official Google blog: We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted.
- dangrossman 16y ago
  The search text is in the referring URL no matter where it was typed in. It's captured without ever looking at Google.

tallanvor 16y ago

I find it amusing that Dilger mentions Overture, which bought alltheweb from FAST in 2003. FAST, of course, was later acquired by Microsoft in 2008. The number of connections among the major search companies is rather amusing, if not necessarily surprising.

coffeemug 16y ago

Oh jeez, not again. This is the Microsoft we know and love to hate, less so now that it is falling apart and must be pitied as an underdog. Let's see: Market cap: Microsoft - 239.49B, Google - 195.50B. Revenue: Microsoft - 66.69B, Google - 29.32B. Profit margin: Microsoft - 30.84%, Google - 29.01%. Falling apart. Right...

andrenotgiant 16y ago
All it took to piece together the author's ignorance was the "Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of “Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),” quote down at the end. I'm sure his line of thought was: "All my friends at Starbucks have MacBook Pros, so Microsoft must be doing really badly." Probably the same reason half his argument seemed to involve Android jealousy...
- j79 16y ago
  Goodness, your comment seems to imply you have an issue with Apple products, their policies, and/or Steve Jobs. Yeah, the guy writes about OS X and Apple, but he's been a tech consultant for nearly two decades. He's worked with various technologies, from various companies. A quick Google search (heh) would have revealed this. Or, what? Did you believe he was some 20-something year old blogger regurgitating the same "FUD" you believe all Apple fanboys are spewing regarding their "Android jealousy"?
megablast 16y ago
Microsoft is still a behemoth, with its fingers in a lot of pies, but unlike Apple and Google, it has not manage to grab onto the future, yet. The future if going mobile, and services. Microsoft has so far lost the mobile race, and the big services do not use MS servers. They are looking in the worst shape to face the future than they have ever, in the last 20 years.
- greyman 16y ago
  I partially agree, but with some caveats: 1. Future is also in the games, and here Microsoft has a very competitive product (xbox/kinect) 2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android). It just came late to the game, but it is not yet clear if too late. I personally think they can catch up with throwing enough money into it. 3. We will see when they release OS for tablets. They are late here as well, but similar to point 2), maybe not too late.

known 16y ago

Microsoft did nothing wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking

1010011010 16y ago

http://createasearchengine.appspot.com http://createasearchengine.appspot.com

fosk 16y ago

I have a feeling that people's reaction on this is biased by the fact that one of the two companies is Microsoft. What happened here it's not ethically correct, but come on guys, we must be honest. This is business, it's about billions, it's about market shares. It's not a news that money is not ethical. Google collects data too, Google does its own shit like everybody else, like Microsoft. Google has its own toolbar too. And all this story seems more a marketing move against Bing. What I want now to happen is to have more competition, instead of crying Google should work hard to be unbeatable and competitive. History teaches us a copy it's never better than the original.

zerd 16y ago

Dilger first asks "Bing is using Google's search results to improve its own. But what’s wrong with that?" If Bing uses Google's search results, then we effectively only have one major search engine. Yahoo has switched to the Bing engine, and Bing gets a big chunk of it's results from Google. So we have a search engine monopoly. That's wrong with that. > "This is the company that indexes blogs [...], and then makes all this information available without consent" He first asks what's wrong with Bing copying Google's results, because it's public content, then says it's immoral to index public content. Double morals? Logic fail?

tree_of_item 16y ago
Where did he say it is immoral to index public content? Google complains about Bing using public content. Google uses public content. Snarky question? Fail?

napierzaza 16y ago

Not really. If Google wants to publicly shame Microsoft it can and is. They're basically saying that Bing is the new "Let me Google that for you". Since they're not currently proceeding with legal motions it's basically just a smear campaign to make people think twice about Bing. And there's truth to it.

andrewcooke 16y ago

Imagine a playground. Young, pre-alpha nerds writhing in chaos. Little arms flailing. Faces red. "Poopy face". "Your mommy smells". Nerd fight.

tnorthcutt 16y ago

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the article switches back and forth between serif and sans-serif font?

droz 16y ago
Nope. Just you.

ddemchuk 16y ago

The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.

SeanLuke 16y ago
> when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, http://yelp.com/robots.txt http://yelp.com/robots.txt Not a mention of GoogleBot.
- ddemchuk 16y ago
  well, they're presented with either 1) killing their organic search traffic by blocking Google or 2) allowing the crawlers but not being able to stop their data from being aggregated and included in local results. Yelp's API specifically says their data cannot be aggregated with other sources. When presented with that, Google simply said they weren't using the API, they were scraping. Apparently scraping is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want if you're Google.

tungwaiyip 16y ago

I'll try to make my point again. There is one school of thinking that Google is profiting by farming information from the Internet, literally on the back of many people's labor. You can prove this by running a "Google Sting", that is known as "Google bombing". By having many people setting up honeypot to link an arbitrary keyword to certain URL, you seem to be able to fool Google to artifically associate such keyword with the URL, thus "proving" Google is profiting from your labor. I don't really buy this logic. But Google's accusation of Bing steal from them seems very close to this line of framing.

earl 16y ago

Responding to merely two points, one hopes Daniel isn't as stupid as his writing. "This is the company that indexes blogs, newspapers, and both digital and physical books, and then makes all this information available without consent in the contexts of its ads and paid search space, and is dismissal of anyone who objects to Google’s ultra liberal sense of copyright. " robots.txt and noindex http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... And "Install the Google Toolbar and do a search of Bing, and Google actually directs your clickstream back for its own analysis" Google/Matt Cutts have been very open about what they do and don't use that information for, and they aren't using click tracking.

zohebv 16y ago

I think Google is being disingenuous with their "bing is copying my data" story. However, please avoid linking to roughlydrafted.com. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I just wanted to point out that if you have read any of the material on the site, you will know that it is just full of flamebait articles with an absurd Apple fixation. Everything Android does is copying Apple. Everything Microsoft does is wrong and stupid. If flash is not supported on iPhone it is because it is the morally correct thing to do. When Apple announced the iPhone without an SDK roughlydrafted called developers stupid for asking for an SDK and that javascript on the web is the new SDK. This post however takes the cake, you must side with Bing because Google is a greater threat to Apple than Microsoft. Seriously, how does Overture even enter into this discussion. It is tiresome to see this site linked to all over the web.