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Microsoft Behind Google Complaints To EC
justice4all writes to share that some of the recent complaints to the European Commission about Google have apparently been coming from Microsoft. "A lawyer for Microsoft confirmed that the software giant told the US Department of Justice and the European Commission how Google’s business practices may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising. [...] 'Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms.'"
I staunchly refuse to use Bing.
Here is why:
1) Shamelessly promoted to the point of paying people off to make it a default choice (EG, Verizon & Blackberry ordeal, many others.)
2) Created expressly to "Stop Google", rather than to fill some otherwise useful purpose. If it had been created to fill some role that google failed to deliver at, then I would consider it useful.
3) Stinks heavily of yet another embrace and extend tactic, "now with 100% More FUD!"
In short, Microsoft's Bing is only on the radar because microsoft has dropped shitpiles of money into promotion. It really doesn't matter to me if it actually works or not; the reasons for it's creation had nothing to do with innovation, and everything to do with disruptive "I want my share too!"
As such, I refuse to use Bing, and I would think many other people would get tired of being bombarded with BING! every time they look for something on a M$ partnered site. I know I grew VERY tired of it when I was helping a friend of mine look for real estate lately; MS had partnered with the realestate brokerage to forbid closeup viewing of the property with highres sat images from Bing's mapping feature, without first greasing the pockets of the Realtor. I have experienced other forms of "Evil" from MS Bing, and am now firmly against ever supporting it.
MS fixed the problem, but not before being called out on it. If it were intentional, that would be expected but probably some serious antitrust concerns would be valid given the default search preferences on IE/windows, which dominates the market, and is branching out into other devices. It's getting better, proving that it can improve even if it doesn't have the huge number of searches to data-mine. Further, is anything stopping MS from looking at Google's search trend pages? Last, there was an article not too long ago about how Google tries to contextualize searches. Publically available, and easily implemented in a way which wouldn't infringe on their patents.
The alternative is even worse - that the biased results were unintentional. Sure it's been fixed, but if your initial launch has results skewed in favor of the owning company and it wasn't on purpose, that's a gigantic pile of fail rolled up in a little humiliation pastry and covered in skank sauce.
gp's point was that MS is complaining about having fewer searches to data-mine, but can't even get the existing search results "fair and balanced". In other words, they need to improve before whining. GGP of course was indicating that Google's method of competition is to produce fair results, while Microsoft's method would be to bias everything towards Windows. Of course we got here by GGGP suggesting that Google's high marketshare will always continue to guarantee high market share because they have more search data for research.
The whole point of all of this is that if Microsoft has good technology and good results, people will be exposed to it through vendor lock-in, one way or another, and eventually discover for themselves that it either sucks or doesn't suck. Microsoft's best strategy is to focus on getting good results with the data they do have, not whine about a better algorithm getting more hits. Of course it will have more market share, Google's ranking algorithm is extremely mature, apparently unbiased, and constantly improving.
Of course, the irony of the king of lock-in complaining about being locked out when they have Bing as default on Windows as well as increasing numbers of phones is delicious like a very expensive dessert. That the initial roll-out of Bing was so fundamentally flawed the GP post still remembers how skewed the results were and feels the need to comment on it should be a clear sign that Bing has an uphill battle, even if they got a live streaming copy of every Google search, legally and with Google's blessing.
Or in other words: Red herring.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/169750/bing_search_reveals_promicrosoft_results.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1496589/can-trust-bing
Verizon require Blackberry default search be Bing, and not changeable. You can visit google.com of course, but that requires extra typing.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/verizon-forcing-microsoft-bing-search-blackberry-users-100
Illuminating comments thread
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1252533&cid=28175167