6 ms·

How Google Ambushed Microsoft and Changed the Subject

32 points by HardyLeung 16y ago

jefe78 16y ago
If Blekko sticks to their word, I'd be inclined to give them a real chance. Sick of my search results being padded with spammy results. EDIT: Having looked at them, I'm a little unclear about what they're trying to do. Are they actually letting end-users tag the web? I.e., Google not allowing users to block certain sources.
- greglindahl 16y ago
  Yes, we're letting end-users tag the web. Try this video: http://vimeo.com/14593120 http://vimeo.com/14593120 ... for the spam example, you can mark a site as spam with a single click. That blocks it only for you, but occasionally we look at aggregate data, and that's why we dropped those 20 sites from our index: because our users don't want to see them.
  - jefe78 16y ago
    That is great to hear! I'm going to put it through its paces! I'd love to share feedback with you once I do.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
the100rabh 16y ago
The reason I stopped reading TC, One sided biased(may be bought out) writeups
recoiledsnake 16y ago
Many articles on TechCrunch seem to be the gossipy type and are not much better than articles in a content farm that the author is railing on.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Humans like to gossip. That's why almost all reporting is boiled down to variations on horse race calling and theatre critique.
brudgers 16y ago
>"I can’t condone any kind of plagiarism or cheating—and that is what Microsoft’s usage of Google data seems to amount to." By academic standards, Google plagiarizes many times a day. In Google's "sting" operation the description Google provides for www.cfacu.org is copied directly from DMOZ. Academic standards don't cut any slack for the ODP license and similar terms. See: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... and http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=clyde+findley+area+credit+union http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=clyde+findley+area+credit+union
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- maeon3 16y ago
  The best argument Microsoft has is: "You Too". Basically: "What I did wasn't wrong because the person complaining does it too."
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - brudgers 16y ago
    My comment was not a defense of Bing but an attempt to point out the absurdity of applying academic standards Microsoft's conduct. Were one to apply academic standards to Binggate, it seems somewhat probable that Google's experimental results would have difficulty passing peer review. Interestingly from a plagiarism standpoint, the description returned by Bing for cfacu.org is far better cited, since it is directly from the website itself rather than from an entirely uncited site like Google's. In terms of academic standards, the results returned by Bing would probably not to be categorized as plagiarism but rather as not meeting style guidelines [such as APA format].
  - gojomo 16y ago
    In this case, I think "You Too" is a pretty good argument. By the standards of web search, pioneered by Google, bootstrapping rankings from clicktrails fits right in with lots of other gray, indirect reuse of others' editorial judgement. The de facto standards here are looser than standards in traditional fields, and that's a good thing! I want Google to be able to liberally use text snippets from around the web. I want web crawling to be allowed by default. (You have to take affirmative steps, adding a robots.txt or other directives, to opt-out. No other written material is treated the same way!) I want most incidental 'infringement' from automated or user-driven processes liberally forgiven. I want Google and all its competitors to use clicktrails and similar signals, if legally available, to improve rankings and fight search manipulation. As much as such practices offend copyright maximalists – a category Google has rarely been included within – these practices also create a giant bonanza of public benefit.
eitally 16y ago
Most of Wadhwa's essays just get a "meh" from me. Nothing particularly original, not always pointed, and they usually don't leave me fulfilled. Perhaps this one may have been useful if the reader had been living under a rock for the last week, but those people don't frequent tech blogs.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- WalterGR 16y ago
  Bing never addressed the points made by the "ambush". Which points did they not address? (I haven't been keeping score so I'm genuinely curious.)
narrator 16y ago
>"We need a standard measure of web quality. " To think that you can come up for an objective standard of quality for any search term is ridiculous. Why not just have a search engine return whatever your objective standard demands everytime and have a perfect score, if it's so easy?
- extension 16y ago
  A metric that can measure the quality of results but not produce them is entirely plausible. Many problems can be verified much more easily than they are solved. For example, you can measure how often results are clicked but there is no straightforward algorithm to generate click-prone results.

32 points by HardyLeung 16y ago

If Blekko sticks to their word, I'd be inclined to give them a real chance. Sick of my search results being padded with spammy results. EDIT: Having looked at them, I'm a little unclear about what they're trying to do. Are they actually letting end-users tag the web? I.e., Google not allowing users to block certain sources.

greglindahl 16y ago
Yes, we're letting end-users tag the web. Try this video: http://vimeo.com/14593120 http://vimeo.com/14593120 ... for the spam example, you can mark a site as spam with a single click. That blocks it only for you, but occasionally we look at aggregate data, and that's why we dropped those 20 sites from our index: because our users don't want to see them.
- jefe78 16y ago
  That is great to hear! I'm going to put it through its paces! I'd love to share feedback with you once I do.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

the100rabh 16y ago

The reason I stopped reading TC, One sided biased(may be bought out) writeups

recoiledsnake 16y ago

Many articles on TechCrunch seem to be the gossipy type and are not much better than articles in a content farm that the author is railing on.

jacques_chester 16y ago
Humans like to gossip. That's why almost all reporting is boiled down to variations on horse race calling and theatre critique.

brudgers 16y ago

>"I can’t condone any kind of plagiarism or cheating—and that is what Microsoft’s usage of Google data seems to amount to." By academic standards, Google plagiarizes many times a day. In Google's "sting" operation the description Google provides for www.cfacu.org is copied directly from DMOZ. Academic standards don't cut any slack for the ODP license and similar terms. See: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... and http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=clyde+findley+area+credit+union http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=clyde+findley+area+credit+union

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
maeon3 16y ago
The best argument Microsoft has is: "You Too". Basically: "What I did wasn't wrong because the person complaining does it too."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- brudgers 16y ago
  My comment was not a defense of Bing but an attempt to point out the absurdity of applying academic standards Microsoft's conduct. Were one to apply academic standards to Binggate, it seems somewhat probable that Google's experimental results would have difficulty passing peer review. Interestingly from a plagiarism standpoint, the description returned by Bing for cfacu.org is far better cited, since it is directly from the website itself rather than from an entirely uncited site like Google's. In terms of academic standards, the results returned by Bing would probably not to be categorized as plagiarism but rather as not meeting style guidelines [such as APA format].
- gojomo 16y ago
  In this case, I think "You Too" is a pretty good argument. By the standards of web search, pioneered by Google, bootstrapping rankings from clicktrails fits right in with lots of other gray, indirect reuse of others' editorial judgement. The de facto standards here are looser than standards in traditional fields, and that's a good thing! I want Google to be able to liberally use text snippets from around the web. I want web crawling to be allowed by default. (You have to take affirmative steps, adding a robots.txt or other directives, to opt-out. No other written material is treated the same way!) I want most incidental 'infringement' from automated or user-driven processes liberally forgiven. I want Google and all its competitors to use clicktrails and similar signals, if legally available, to improve rankings and fight search manipulation. As much as such practices offend copyright maximalists – a category Google has rarely been included within – these practices also create a giant bonanza of public benefit.

eitally 16y ago

Most of Wadhwa's essays just get a "meh" from me. Nothing particularly original, not always pointed, and they usually don't leave me fulfilled. Perhaps this one may have been useful if the reader had been living under a rock for the last week, but those people don't frequent tech blogs.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

WalterGR 16y ago
Bing never addressed the points made by the "ambush". Which points did they not address? (I haven't been keeping score so I'm genuinely curious.)

narrator 16y ago

>"We need a standard measure of web quality. " To think that you can come up for an objective standard of quality for any search term is ridiculous. Why not just have a search engine return whatever your objective standard demands everytime and have a perfect score, if it's so easy?

extension 16y ago
A metric that can measure the quality of results but not produce them is entirely plausible. Many problems can be verified much more easily than they are solved. For example, you can measure how often results are clicked but there is no straightforward algorithm to generate click-prone results.