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Nice try, dick cocker, but Google actually stole a shit ton of Bing features. Also: http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279

Get that fat, hairy Google cock out of your asshole.

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279

OK, here's an article describing with some more detail what happened.

You are mistaken, Google does not attempt to copyright its search results. In fact, they found Bing was copying their search results and publicly shamed them about it, but never claimed infringement of any kind.

Forgot to add my reference link in the previous comment:
[1] http://searchengineland.com/ebay-pulls-google-adwords-ads-to-protest-google-checkout-moves-11468

I believe in questioning authority up until a certain point, and that point is reached when I am the authority. I say fine them for every incident 25K is a big fat nothing if it stands alone up against a corporate infrastructure with billions in the bank. I also disagree with the "_nomap" angle we shouldn't have to be forced to append _nomap to our SSID's. Instead Google should make it opt in... those who wish to be mapped can append _MapMe to their SSID if they so choose, it would only be fair.

Please try to keep in mind, these laws are old, and not being under the reign of a monarch is new. These issues will affect every former UK colony.

It is really not much different, functionally speaking, from a telephone number, an email address or a room number. Are telephone numbers copyrighted? Don't think so. Are email addresses copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.

Australia and NZ are still hashing it out, actually.
http://www.baldwins.com/australian-and-new-zealand-copyright-law-for-databases-compilations-and-directories/

And who pays for postal codes to be created/used in the first place? The Canadian taxpayer. That should make postal codes a "public good", owned collectively by the taxpaying Canadian public. Creating a free listing of postal codes, where anyone can look up postal codes, is a convenience, and a service rendered to the public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Canada
"Permission to reproduce Government of Canada works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce."

And a good one too, since it is "free", and nobody profits from it.

The "otherwise specified" part would seem to be the $5000 Canada Post wants to charge for its directory. Which it has the right to do. Statistics Canada also charges for its data, one of the few places where government documents are not free. Why? Because information has value. The Do Not Call List has a trivial price attached to it, and has been exploited to high hell because foreign telemarketers can afford to do it and are not bound by our laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List#Criticism

Besides, if search engines can index the entire f___ing Internet, without anyone crying "Oy! That's my copyrighted webpage you are indexing!",

Ok, now you're just starting to look silly and ill informed...
http://searchengineland.com/proposed-uk-law-would-immunize-search-engines-against-copyright-claims-33336
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/08/industry-google-afp-dc-idUSN0728115420070408
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1457-Search-Engines-Indexing-and-Copyright-Law
http://www.blogstudiolegalefinocchiaro.com/wordpress/?p=258

how can a simple "Canadian postal code lookup function" be a breach of copyright? If the article is correct, the site in question didn't even copy the Postal Services postal code database. It built its own, from user contributions. I really don't see how "copyright" even figures into this case...

It's not the engine, it's the data. Postal codes were *authored*, there is no question about that.

Except M$ doesn't also mean multiple sclerosis.

"MS" has several different meanings. One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. Another is a disease. At least both connotations of "M$" (greed and old BASIC) clearly say Microsoft.

The disclaimer they were talking about is mentioned near the end of the original article.

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened.

So you can see (after reading the Blogger entry) that they're not talking about merely stating that the voice of the people is political, but that the search results are "slanted" by persons gaming the system. Presumably they think their results are now game-proof enough to no longer merit such disclaimers, and that the idea that

"Santorum means the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that's occasionally the byproduct of anal sex."

is just a popular enough idea to rank highly in search results (i.e., is the "voice of the people" as you put it). Otherwise, except for nits, I agree with your comment.

http://searchengineland.com/google-screenwise-panel-open-110716

Actually, it's a commercial jet. Boeing 767-200 to be exact. And it had nothing to do with Ellison's yacht AFAIK. You IPO with billions of dollars. A jet is likely one of the first few purchases....

When did webpages start averaging nearly a megabyte? That's insane! Something has gone horribly wrong!

I have an article from 2010 which claims 320kb -- and I thought that was a bit much. Did we really make a jump that large in just a few years? Has the web become that inefficient?

We need to reverse this trend.

Nothing was ever debunked. Quite the opposite, Microsoft publicly admitted they used Google results in Bing, and basically said they plan to continue. So, all data points to them still doing it.

This is the very consequence many people imagined the moment Google announced this. For clear examples of how Search Plus pushes Google+ over relevant results, read this article by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand. Some of the examples include popular music artists, like Katy Perry, who has one of the most popular Facebook pages but doesn't appear in the Search Plus results because she doesn't have a Google+ account. How is that delivering the most relevant results, which was the original goal of the Google search engine? In fact, Google's search engine is becoming less useful at delivering relevant results compared to alternatives, with the major example in that link being a search for "gold price" on Google versus Wolfram Alpha: Google gives you a big, brown box of sponsored links, while Wolfram Alpha gives you a simple price chart.

The biggest reason, in my opinion, to dislike Search Plus is that it continues the trend of search engine bubbling that is filtering the content you see on the Internet today, possibly limiting you from seeing opposing information that might change a currently held perspective.

This wasn't just misbehaving. What Google did was outright illegal. Not only did they falsely claim that they have business partnership with Mocality, they also claimed that Mocality is engaging in bait-and-switch practices to try and charge businesses up to $200 for their listing. Mocality said they have never charged businesses and never will.

Such blatant lies aren't just misbehavior, they are pure fraud. Google is trying to destroy their competitor in any way possible and in turn profit from lies. This is not a new practice to Google - they haven't been able to gain market share in social space because Facebook and Twitter got there first (of who did it well), and it's seriously injuring their currently. They are desperately trying to change that with Google+ but they know they're unable to do so because they weren't there at the right time. Google is also facing serious competition in Russia, China, South Korea and a few other countries where local search engines have the largest market share and Google is unable to compete as again, they weren't there at the right time.

Google has a long history of scraping other websites and then dropping them lower in search in favor of their own sites. They have been doing this for ages with hotels, restaurants and similar information. They're also trying to do it with flights information. All of these practices will net Google enemies and most likely antitrust issues. But Google doesn't care - they know how important timing is and they will abuse their position whenever they can to get there. It's a long term goal and Google has managed to get the position where no one can really touch them even if they misbehave. Seriously, they were also found out polluting search engines with paid links. After that they blame someone else and try to seem like a good guy. The most hilarious thing is that most geeks believe them just because they use open source (while ironically their products are all proprietary).

And note that this isn't just Google's Kenyan office misbehaving. They also received calls from Google's Indian call centers engaging in similar practices, so this is a practice accepted from Google's HQ.
On top of that, EPIC has said they will try to get antitrust investigation into Google's introduction of Google+ into search results. People are finally starting to wake up to see how bad Google is and how it abuses other companies.

With all the recent G+ shenanigans I'm going to change my browser's default search to Bing for a week and see how it goes. I'll add a link-bar shortcut to Google in case I'm not happy with any particular search, but I have the "go to the search box" keyboard shortcut so totally ingrained in my muscle memory that it'll take conscious effort to use Google.

I'm not saying I'll quit Google forever, because what if MS does something sleazy soon, but competition is supposed to make things better for all of us, so for now, I'll go wherever it's best.

That's accurate. Google claims that Essence Digital and Unruly Media misinterpreted what Google wanted, and should have inserted Chrome advertising alongside content; not being content in itself, sponsored or otherwise.

An initial report: Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
Follow-up: Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

That's accurate. Google claims that Essence Digital and Unruly Media misinterpreted what Google wanted, and should have inserted Chrome advertising alongside content; not being content in itself, sponsored or otherwise.

An initial report: Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
Follow-up: Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

Here's an informed opinion on the subject.

If you look at the actual data, that's pretty well supported. Here's an article from Sept 8 showing that searches from Bing.com are 12% of the search market, searches from yahoo.com are 15% of the search market, and it's only when you talk about the agglomeration known as "Bing powered search" that Bing even gets close to 33% of the search market.

It seems like most people aren't really searching on Bing; they're searching on Google and Yahoo and their web browser, and occasionally Bing provides those results.

I hate to plug Microsoft, but I can think of another thing MS probably got right that Google definitely didn't: it didn't take them well over a year to show Louisville as a city.

I wonder how Bing maps is about dealing with user-reported errors or suggestions? I gave up on reporting anything to Google Maps long ago because they never actually fixed anything. They'd email me back weeks later saying the problem was fixed, except that nothing had changed.

As far as I know it still has access to an app store

no, it doesn't. it does not have any google apps.
http://searchengineland.com/amazon-android-tablet-undermines-google-94664

that's common sense. amazon wants to drive people to amazon books sales not google books, to amazon appstore, not google market, to amazon VOD, not google movies.

will you be able to get google market through some sort of hack? probably.

Article implies bing does not suck article is wrong

Many reviews and attempts at testing relevance now rank Bing US results as very competitive with Google (fx this one). But it seems that it is only US Bing that doesn't suck.

No, Skyhook's definitely not the technology under the hood. In fact, Motorola replaced Google's built-in geolocation with Skyhook on their Android handsets, but Google pitched a fit about this. And so Motorola dropped Skyhook again and returned to Google's geolocation system, and Skyhook sued Google.

Sad that Google has all the data that maps from keyword searches to clicked links that make Google far better than any search engine that is less used. This is the lifeblood of any search engine. Thinking of which, doesn't that data actually belong to all us who generate it? Maybe the DoJ should get involved and get Google to reveal this data to other search engines before Google becomes an abusing monopoly(if it hasn't already happened, see lawsuits). Bing got panned on here and elsewhere for trying to get a little of this data after getting permission from people who installed the Bing bar.

Also, how is it not monopoly abuse that Google Maps, Finance, etc. etc. get heavy promotion(not even an ad) on Google search engine which leads to smaller players like Yahoo Maps and MapQuest getting killed off? How is this different from IE vs. Netscape? http://searchengineland.com/the-problems-with-googles-house-ads-48325

  Monopoly abuse happens to all companies, monopolies eventually suck, atleast Bing is trying.

Care to comment on how successful Linux has been on handsets compared to its Windows equivalent? Or how about servers. Big servers. Like, oh I dunno, maybe you've heard of Google? m$ sure have - they just shell out all their searches to it.

On Tuesday May 17, @01:17AM, David Gerard opined:
> Steve Ballmer has reiterated his willingness to hook up with Yahoo!

Yahoo already hooked-up with Microsoft's Bing 2 years ago. When you look at Yahoo search results, you're really looking at Bing results.

And when you are looking at Bing Results you are actually looking at the results Bing copied from Google.

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

Google (via YouTube) and Facebook are way ahead of you on figuring that one out.

Incidentally, the last I heard before this, Netflix had something like 26.9% of prime time traffic (and were #1) with YouTube and Facebook distant #2 and #3 (at 19% and 17% I believe), so the only news here is their % went up ~3% (I made a post on that about a month ago).

Right ... because they don't do ANYTHING to honor black history month ...

http://searchengineland.com/martin-luther-king-day-logos-from-google-others-33703

Nope, never have they done anything ...

It has been discussed before, Bing is NOT using Google's results. The algos are optimized in a similar manner often yielding very close results. MS have their own crawlers, search engine, database backends and the latest version of Bing seach is very competitive.

It's also been discussed before the users that have the Bing toolbar installed but make google searches end up reporting search information to microsoft that microsoft then uses in Bing. See this article and this related slashdot discussion.

Er, Google is better than Bing. The head Bing guy in charge admits it. Furthermore, they admit it with their actions. I mean, wholesale copying Google's results. Yeah, that really makes me confident in their product. Or, maybe, Bing is a sad joke and I'll just keep using Google as it is, face it, the superior product.

The Slashdot posting was mostly plagarized from this story at SearchEngineLand. That story also has the phrase "And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely.", without saying who it was. Searching for that phrase in Google brings up 73 results from sites which scraped that article, but no insight. Variations on that phrase bring up mostly hits to scraper sites.

Clearly, the new Google patch doesn't detect scraper sites. Catching those would be a big win, because there are so many of them and they have near zero value.

There's a new nonprofit site in the UK, Churnalism, which is intended to help detect which stories were copied from other content. But its database is too small and its algorithms too weak to detect much. It may improve; they're just starting out.

Not quite correct in your BFD. 100 users from Google went home and tried various keyword searches. Of course they are not going to illustrate every one in the article. I don't even have to have more information to come up with one. How about something like: mbzrxpgiys. From the original article. http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 . We must now ask ourselves if Microsoft is really adding anything of value to the Internet with this harvesting feature. Suppose that Google did not exist and users were feeding from Bing into Bing. All we would get is search results that people got simply by clicking the most appealing one by inspection at the top. Is that innovation?

It is obivous, even from reading Google's details of the allegated copying that Microsoft is copying search results.

It is only obvious if you choose to close your eyes. Go read http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279. This is by the guy who *originally broke* the story. And he is backpedaling and having second thoughts. Google manipulated him, but now he thinks they didn't really mean to. Google engineers were just incompetent?

Microsoft does disclose that Suggested Sites collects information about sites you visit. From the privacy policy: When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. To help protect your privacy, the information is encrypted when sent to Microsoft. Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included. For example, if you visited the Microsoft.com search website at http://search.microsoft.com/ and entered "Seattle" as the search term, the full address http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=0&FORM=QBMH1&mkt=en-US will be sent. I've bolded the key parts. What you're searching on gets sent to Microsoft. Even though the example provided involves a search on Microsoft.com, the policy doesn't prevent any search -- including those at Google -- from being sent back.

It's worth reading the IE privacy policy to see what all they reserve the right to do with what you do in IE. I don't see the limitations regarding which components specifically will spy on you; some mention it specifically and then there's a broad statement about recording what you do and sending it to Redmond.

IMHO, that's the real story here. That, and the fact that people apparently still need reminding that MSFT is an advertiser just like GOOG, just less successful at it to date.

I know this is /., but seriously your comment is clueless. This is not what happened at all.

You can read a good follow-up by the guy who broke the story initially: http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279. This guy has second-thoughts and several goof insights. Basically what this boils down to is Google engineers being incompetent in their analysis and blinded by their beliefs that their work was being stolen.

I think this article says everything that needs to be said on the issue:

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279

Essentially Bing's defense (as outlined in the article) goes like this:

• Bing is monitoring users who opted in to send Bing data. They are watching their activity on any site, and not specifically Google.
• The search signal generated by users does not dominate, unless it's the only signal (as Google tried to ensure it would be) it will have more weight, but not absolute. Even Google's test showed this to be true, as only a fraction of their honeypot terms made it to the other side.
• Less frequent seach terms (the example given is pontneddfechan) Bing's results are relevant, unique, and ordered differently from Google's. Google's tests reveal the very special case where 0 signal comes from other sources.
• What's the BFD in the end? Google alleges Bing is stealing results, but only shows one concrete example of this (tarsorrhaphy), which can be easily accounted for by crawling Wikipedia, which seems much more likely.

This is one of the only sensible comments here. The Google fanboyism around Slashdot is almost alarming.

I think this article says everything that needs to be said on the issue:

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279

Essentially Bing's defense (as outlined in the article) goes like this:

• Bing is monitoring users who opted in to send Bing data. They are watching their activity on any site, and not specifically Google.
• The search signal generated by users does not dominate, unless it's the only signal (as Google tried to ensure it would be) it will have more weight, but not absolute. Even Google's test showed this to be true, as only a fraction of their honeypot terms made it to the other side.
• Less frequent seach terms (the example given is pontneddfechan) Bing's results are relevant, unique, and ordered differently from Google's. Google's tests reveal the very special case where 0 signal comes from other sources.
• What's the BFD in the end? Google alleges Bing is stealing results, but only shows one concrete example of this (tarsorrhaphy), which can be easily accounted for by crawling Wikipedia, which seems much more likely.

This is less a PR stunt and more a confirmation that Bing was copying Google results for misspelled words as was made clear in the original article.

Um, from the article that started all this:

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.

So real users out there, who happen to have the Bing toolbar installed and opted-in to tracking, searched for "mbzrxpgjys", "hiybbprqag", etc? That seems unlikely.

Nope. Real users did, however, apparently search for various other terms that didn't actually exist on the Web but that Google did find results for - specifically, misspelt queries that Google could guess the correct spelling of but that Bing couldn't make sense of. These search results then appeared to have been copied into Bing's results for these terms, often in cases where Bing had no way of telling that the site was related to the search term other than Google's results.

The bogus queries like "mbzrxpgjys" were faked by Google, but only to confirm their theory as to how Bing had been copying their search results for genuine search queries made by real end users. If you'd read the original article you should know this.

It's not in the EULA.

You're right; it's perhaps in the privacy policy (arguably, this is part of the EULA, but it's also a separate document):

Microsoft does disclose that Suggested Sites collects information about sites you visit. From the privacy policy: When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. To help protect your privacy, the information is encrypted when sent to Microsoft. Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included. For example, if you visited the Microsoft.com search website at http://search.microsoft.com/ and entered âoeSeattleâ as the search term, the full address http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=0&FORM=QBMH1&mkt=en-US will be sent. Iâ(TM)ve bolded the key parts. What youâ(TM)re searching on gets sent to Microsoft. Even though the example provided involves a search on Microsoft.com, the policy doesnâ(TM)t prevent any search â" including those at Google â" from being sent back.

(source: TOFA: http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914) It's worth reading the rest of the privacy policy; apparently other bits of IE can and will send your information to Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/privacy.aspx

Not just the Bing toolbar according to Google.

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

They also do it with suggested sites.
So thanks for all your hostility. Clearly I have absolutely no knowledge of technology.

This used to be a fun, community site. Now its populated by trolls and jerks.

Probably Google let Bing watch by intentionally performing these searches with the toolbar installed

Thanks for following along, that's exactly what Google did.

When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled.

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

Wrong

From http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914:

When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled.

So the Google engineers installed the bing toolbar, and when they did, Microsoft asked them if it was okay to look at the sites they visited and the links they clicked on, to which they replied "Okay." The Google engineers then typed in the phony terms, visited the phony links, and thereby sent the phony data to Microsoft.

Microsoft sees it and says, "it looks like people are searching for this term and like this result. We've never seen this before, we should probably index this."

The key here is that Microsoft asked the user (Google in this case) if they could look at the data to improve Bing, the user sends the data to Microsoft (which they agreed to do), and now they're raising a storm because (surprise!) Microsoft did with the data exactly what they said they would do.

Except Google did offer real searches where they thought they were the deciding factor: "torsoraphy". The "Bing String" showed that Microsoft's algorithm would republish Google's search results as their own. There's no way outside of reviewing Bing's algorithm and logs how many real search results are "powered by Google".

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

I have no words.

"It’s difficult for me to feel a sense of injustice or outrage with any of the big search engines, because their products have so clearly immitated each other for so long. Google isn’t at all pure in this area" Chris Silver Smith

Do please provide veriable examples of Google copying Microsoft?

"Even your criticism of Google seems aimed at ‘lesser’ offences", Badams

Please provide verifiable examples of Googles greater offences?

"Google aren’t entirely blameless when it comes to being a little bit too creepy about the amount of data they aggregate about users" James Lowery

It's about Bing stealing Google search results to boost their own ranking. Provide verifiable citations where Google does the exact same.

"@Danny I agree and think this will cost Google some credibility and am curious how Google will respond to this situation as well! Great article and thank you for sharing!" Ashley Sellers link

What are you on, or even on about, Microsoft gets caught stealing Google search results and using it to boost Bing search results.

These are called "stems" and Google uses them extensively.

Um, yes, the first results may come from OneBox, which is not from their "Algorithmic" search, but from a separate service that triggers on certain keywords, like "music", "movie"... and "csco". Adding commas just makes it not trigger the OneBox search. It used to be that the OneBox results are more visually different from the rest of the results, but the recent redesigns makes them very much alike.

OneBox is also used to implement features like "10 km in miles". See also http://searchengineland.com/meet-the-google-onebox-plus-box-direct-answers-the-10-pack-26706 I'm not use if they still use the word "OneBox" to describe this feature though, but it is still used in the Google Search Appliances.

Disclaimer. IANAGoogler, reposting this from my reddit reply.