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Nate Silver: How Much Does Bing Borrow From Google?
- noibl 16y agoA common counter-argument seems to be 'But this effect only happens when there are no other sources of relevance data'. Well... 'over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: *popular queries*, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries.' -- http://goo.gl/Bi0JH [googleblog] Now it's possible that Bing really did have no data for these 'popular queries' but I don't think that's an argument anyone would like to make. The alternative interpretation is that top-ranked pages in Google get added prominently to Bing after some interaction involving the toolbar, even when there are lots of other possible matches. You can still say that this would represent just a single data-point among many but unless you think Google is lying, you can't say that it only happens with rare searches. BTW: I'm not arguing that there is direct evidence that the mentioned effect on popular queries is related to the toolbar. But the effect is there.
- kenjackson 16y agoThe problem is that Google is doing the wrong test to prove their point. The should search for Justin Bieber and add in the Bieber search results some really horrible link. MS should have a lot of relevant info for Justin Bieber, so the Google data should be rated lowly. If this non-sensical result makes the first page then you can begin to assume that their weighing it heavily. But when your query is "erftqnvpwedf" -- that just means that the only relevant info is coming from the toolbar. Bing would show that result even if the toolbar only accounted for 1/(2^50) of the total relevance. I suspect Google did this test and has nothing to report.
- noibl 16y agoThey're talking about their top-ranking result being used. Are you suggesting that Google place garbage as the top-ranking Bieber result for visitors who use the toolbar?
- kenjackson 16y agoNo. Just for visitors that are coming from a specific IP address (their engineers). The only people that would see the bad results are their engineers. But the URL and data that the toolbar gets looks just like any other one. This is pretty straightforward and I'd be surprised if Google didn't have the infrastructure in pface to do this today (like literally today).
- noibl 16y agoOK, I understand what you mean now. :)
- kenjackson 16y agoAnd to be clear (if anyone from Google is reading) you don't just want to do 'Justin Bieber' since I suspect a lot of people with the toolbar actually do that search. Also do things like 'radix-2 fft', something where there is a lot of additional signals (I suspect), yet something that other toolbar members probably aren't searching for. So the toolbar data MS gets is strongly skewed to your results.
- jhamburger 16y agoBut then their bad results would be outweighed by the hundreds or thousands of other Bing toolbar users doing Bieber searches getting legitimate results fed back to Bing.
- kenjackson 16y agoI address this later (although probably after you started writing this comment). :-)
- barrkel 16y agoThe test you suggest doesn't address the actual problem that Google is complaining about - long-tail, rare searches, especially ones that contain misspellings. This is the very thing that Google is saying that Bing is stealing with their clickstream data, and it's also the one that you're agreeing would occur - "that the only relevant info is coming from the toolbar" for highly unlikely queries. So it seems to me, looking at your argument, that you actually agree with Google's point.
- kenjackson 16y agoMy comment is in response to a comment about "popular queries". And really to the meta issue about how much it is weighed in general. Google is trying to argue a huge PR point by saying, "Bing copies" with the ramification being that when you search on Bing you're really searching on Google. If Google said this, "For extremely rare searches where Bing has few, if any, good signals, clickthroughs from Google will be weighed in such a way that these results may make the first page". I'd buy that 100%. The Bing team may even buy it. Google seems to want to start with that thesis, but then try to shove the whole camel in too.
- gojomo 16y agoThere are multiple mechanisms by which Google's rankings will diffuse out to other services. For example, lots of SEO and normal research studies the top Google results, or keywords revealed from referrer info and other logs, and then mimics those results elsewhere on the web, including outlinking to top results found via Google. So anything prominent in Google's results will be echoed elsewhere in crawlable form, and probably associated with the same terms by which it was found at Google. Then those once-unique results will 'later appear' in other resources. You can't be the dominating giant of the industry – the "single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages" (as Blekko's Skrenta calls Google) – and not have this leakage happen. It goes with the territory.
- noibl 16y agoRankings analysis always starts with keywords of interest, even though Google can be used to identify keywords by relation. Referrer logs seeding outside sources with gibberish keywords that literally nobody is interested in? That's a stretch.
- gojomo 16y agoI'm not saying this is specifically how the gibberish Google probes landed in Bing; I'm saying this is a way that, even for popular queries, Google's ranking judgements and unique results are going to slowly diffuse out over time, and be echoed elsewhere, even without URL-trail mining (which shortcuts/supercharges the process).
- noibl 16y agoFair enough. I agree that naive indexers will make lots of crude and meaningless associations. I don't think Bing falls into that category though.
- blahedo 16y agoBut think about that claim: a result that shows up in Google's results for a popular query also shows up in Bing's results for a popular query. Maybe because it's a good result? Possibly Bing arrived at it the same way Google did? Or has Google been slipping paper streets into their queries for longer than they're telling us? In short: how did they know that it was "URLs from Google search results" that they were seeing in the Bing results?
- burgerbrain 16y ago"Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing." If it was a popular query, and both google and bing made the same "mistake", doesn't that seem a tad suspicious to you?
- JoelSutherland 16y agoI read this article because it was written by Nate Silver so I expected something substantial. There is not. With much writing, he essentially says the following: 1. Microsoft's defense contains no information because they don't say how they weight the data learned from Google searches. 2. It's hard to say how Microsoft is actually using the data learned from Google searches. For the crowd here this is essentially common-sense. (edit: in point two I changed 'impossible' to 'hard')
- noibl 16y agoWhere are you getting point 2 from? In many cases where they have no other data, they clearly weight Google's single data point high enough to create a whole SERP around it. The claim that 'this is just one input among many' implies that some kind of cross-referencing or corroboration takes place. In this experiment that obviously didn't happen.
- jhamburger 16y ago> they clearly weight Google's single data point high enough to create a whole SERP around it This really doesn't tell us anything about how highly it is weighted relative to other data though, since obviously there will be no other data to weigh in on a nonsense search term.
- noibl 16y agoMy point was that the algorithmic conclusion 'oh well, let's just print it anyway, since it's from Google' is pretty weighty on its own.
- muro 16y agoWhile we have no idea why this result is good, Google seems to think it's fine. If it's good enough for google, it's good enough for us.
- JoelSutherland 16y ago
- erikpukinskis 16y agoThe problem is that Google's "experiment" didn't include a control group. Is Bing copying Google's results, or just measuring click data? The trivial addition to their experiment would be to add those nonsense words to a few Wikipedia pages, and click the links with the Bing toolbar installed, and see if those pages show up in the Bing results.
- barrkel 16y agoMeasuring click data that gets turned into a correlation between the query string and the result on Google's SERP is copying Google's result, because that's the upshot of it - that is its effect, in these rare long-tail searches.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoIf the toolbar is simply sending "they clicked link X from a page with text 'A B C'" and they are using that in their search engine to mean "If someone searches for A, B, or C, they might be looking for X" then that is, in fact, NOT copying Google's results, it is a general measurement of how users react to ALL web pages.
- mukyu 16y agoYou have very little actual knowledge of what their experiments entailed.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoWhat are you talking about? They wrote an entire blog post about what their experiments entailed.
- msravi 16y agoThis is like trying to find the answer to an unsolvably hard problem on a test whose answer should be "None of the above". Then, peek at your neighbor (who has a reputation for scoring well), and on realization that his answer is different, change yours to match his. Plain lack of confidence in your ability.
- contextfree 16y agoa test is a controlled experiment. it's nothing like product development. analogies between the two make no sense.
- tzs 16y agoA better analogy using Italian restaurants than his would be something like this. You are standing on the street, watching people go into businesses. You observe a man and woman walk up, and the woman says "which of these restaurants should we dine in?". The man pulls out a well-known restaurant guide, and clearly looks up both. Then they walk into Mario Batali's restaurant. Later, someone comes up to you and asks which is the best italian restaurant on that street. You recall that the couple with the restaurant guide picked Batali's, and so you point them to it. Google would say you are ripping off the restaurant guide. Microsoft would say you are just using the observed behavior of the first couple to guide you.
- noibl 16y agoDisclosure: you are also a restaurant guide.
- burgerbrain 16y agoFuller disclosure: you are in direct competition with the first restaurant guide and have released public statements explaining why you are better than the first.
- msravi 16y agoAnd you don't bother to consider the other 999 aspects that are screaming at you to look up and see that the restaurant doesn't even exist.
- tmoertel 16y agoHere's the problem I have with Google's claims about Bing: Google suggests that Bing is cheating but hasn't demonstrated that Bing's behavior somehow deviates from what is optimal in a machine-learning sense. Thus, the real question is whether Bing should cripple its machine-learning algorithms if they infer (correctly) that Google-suggested results are likely to be relevant. That is, if any learning system is observing click-stream behavior from users and mining it for relevance evidence, I'd expect it to ultimately home in on the true weight of each piece of evidence in that click-stream data. Since Google's contributions to that data are likely to be highly relevant, any good machine learning system is going to learn that they are relevant and start recommending them. In effect, then, what Google is arguing is that if Bing's machine-learning algorithms are correctly inferring that results that happen to come from Google are highly relevant, Bing should blind itself to that knowledge. I'm not sure that's good for anyone except Google. (For a completely uninformed guess about why Google might be interested in raising copycat claims about Bing, I go out on a limb here: http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2011/02/02/the-google-microsoft-squabble-over-bing-results-some-completely-uninformed-speculation http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2011/02/02/the-google-micro...)
- ars 16y agoBut that means that you have not created an actual search program. You are just using googles data. Or to put it another way: If google did not exist do you still have a (good) search program? If the answer is no, then there is no reason for them to exist.
- tmoertel 16y ago> But that means that you have not created an actual search program. You are just using googles data. No, if your learning system is working properly you should be using Google's data only to the extent it is legitimately observable and more relevant than anything else you're feeding your system. And, for lots of searches, Google's data leave much room for other sources to be more relevant. In the limiting case, when you're feeding your system everything that Google is feeding its, you should almost never return Google-derived knowledge because your system should almost always be able to come up with greater relevance from knowledge derived from primary sources. Your final question is on the right track, but I'd suggest a small tweak: If Google didn't exist, would the system still offer highly relevant results and, if Google did exist, would the system be able to learn from Google-supplied knowledge, to the extent allowed by law and terms of service and so forth, to offer results at least as relevant?
- trustfundbaby 16y agoI still don't understand how this is not cheating. Microsoft has lifted Google's SERPs verbatim for a particular search ... what else is there to discuss?
- xenocom 16y agoWell, from what I read elsewhere, Microsoft is saying that Google admitted to using the Bing toolbar during their testing, and that plays into the Bing results as it associates soon-after visited pages with the queries they used... actually kind of a smooth way to harness user interaction to power search relevance, if you ask me.
- pshirishreddy 16y agoALL OF IT !!