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Bing Is Cheating, Copying Google Search Results
An anonymous reader writes "Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google's results, then uses that information to improve Bing's own search listings. Bing doesn't deny this."
And why is that cheating? Sounds like simple observance in an effort to get improve results.
They should really reinvent the wheel. Copying Google's wheel isn't fair! ...
I don't expect any mod points for this post... but I'll just say that I'm not surprised by this. Since the launch of Bing, I've kind of questioned how MSFT could have come up with a 'superior' search engine so quickly. Their second (at least) attempt since 2000.....
Huh?
Is it cheating if Toyota watches what type of car styles Ford drivers prefer and then makes more cars of that style?
If this information is publicly available, then its not cheating. Its tailoring your service to better serve the customers of a competitor. Isn't that usually how you draw customers to you from a competitor?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It just made the decision to copy from Google.
I DIP YOU DIP WE DIP
(into someone else's IP)
Yahoo -> Bing -> Google
Looks like Yahoo gets the 3-day-old-bagel of search results.
It seems like this is publicly available information. Were there any stipulations, even if informal, on how that information could be used?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
From the article it seems that MS is tracking which google (and I assume any other search engine, including Bing) search results people are clicking, and then trying to promote these in their results.
It does sound like something very logical to do to improve search results, doesn't it?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Now what happens if Google, to improve its search results, starts copying Bing as well? Is this feedback interconnection stable, or will it merely result in spurious noise being amplified, which commentators will misidentify as vast social movements?
why people ever said Bing returned more relevant results. Maybe it's just because I've been using Google forever that I now know what to type in to get the results I want, but running the same searches over at Bing has_never_gotten me as relevant results.
Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine:
So this "opt-in" program can track all of your clicks and record it for whatever. This is nothing like the Google privacy violation at all, they "opted-in" to this search toolbar so all privacy violations about seeing everything you click on are now your problem.
Dictionary makers deliberately introduce "mountweazels", fake words designed to catch people violating their copyrights. Map makers use "copyright traps", fake streets.
Sounds like Google did this on a one-time basis, but it seems to me that they could make it permanent. If nothing else, finding the mountweazels could be fun.
They already have a few jokes interspersed, like "anagram" and "french military victories". I wonder if Bing shows unexpected results for those.
Copying other people's work is a fine old Microsoft tradition.
:)
I'd just like to know who Bill G sat next to when he took the SAT
I'd send 'em all directly to goatse.
unless that's what they were searching for
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
People are not leaving Google because other search engines are getting better.
Rather, people are leaving because Google is getting worse and has lost focus of search simplicity.
Google instant drove me out.
If start typing and several pages fly by per second, this increases the garbage to information ratio, is inefficient, and disruptive. Often, the result is a blank page.
I switched to duckduckgo, as it simple, and the results are good.
Occasionally, I will use !g in the duckduckgo search to access google, but I try to avoid it.
Google should stop worrying about Bing, and look within.
"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.
- embrace the google addon for MS Explorer so you can copy its data
- extend your own MS Bing engine with new features incompatible with the google addon
- extinguish the google addon because it can't use the new MS extensions (or simply disallowing its use in Explorer 10)
- profit
.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It seems like this is publicly available information.
They are capturing user's search results on Google from users using Internet Explorer with the Bing Toolbar and/or Suggested Sites, and using that to drive Bing rankings. It's not "publicly available information". It does appear to be information within the scope of the privacy policy associated with those features, though.
but Americans are big on getting "the genuine article". From a marketing standpoint, at least, this is cheating, because Google is the 'real deal' and Bing's just a copy cat.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is it cheating if Toyota watches what type of car styles Ford drivers prefer and then makes more cars of that style?
That's not what is happening here. If you need things in the form of a car analogy, its as if Toyota manufactured spark plugs that were installed in cars, some of which were Fords, and the spark plugs had sensors which could be used to detect information about the engine that they were installed in, and transmit that information back to Toyota, and Toyota used that information to feed into their own engine designs.
You know, people complain that Chrome--built on Chromium, an open source browser, could be sending who knows what to Google about your browsing habits. However, Chrome is entirely optional and user-installed, whereas IE comes standard with windows--to the point where they got in huge-ass trouble previously for stifling competition with it. But while Google lays its cards out for everyone to see (except for the places where Chrome isn't Chromium, admittedly), in order to forestall objections that they might be doing something like this, Microsoft flat-out does it, behind your back.
Now, some people have said it's a Bing Toolbar thing, and I dunno, not having RTFA; but even so, how often is that going to be shovelware that preys on unwitting users, like every OTHER friggin' IE toolbar? So not only is it preying on Google's algorithm, not only is it stealing user data, it's also coercing unwitting users to be their mule in this attack.
There's nothing you can say that makes this taste even marginally better. It's shit, and the Bing team should be ashamed, if not prosecuted.
Most likely, Bing is acquiring clickthrough data from textbox input and pairing it with link click followthrough. That is, Bing watches what people type and what links they click after typing it. Did Google ever try other mechanisms to munge results, such as using an internal search page (i.e. one where it uses some proprietary engine to search, say, a forum) and see if Bing started reporting those results? If so, it would indicate that coming from Google had nothing to do with the mechanism of acquisition, and that it was strictly parsing URL or textbox entries combined with link clickthrough. Implying that Bing's response of "we use a lot of vectors" is the same as saying "we steal stuff from Google, so what" is trolltastic at best, and blatantly misleading at worst.
It seems like this is publicly available information.
But it's not, you obviously didn't read the article. Here was the process: 1) Google employee makes sure some fake word does not exist in google or bing search results. 2) Said employee points google's cache results of that word to some random page. 3) Said employee uses Internet Explorer at his desk at Google to make the search appear in Google, then selects the only link as the correct thing he was looking for and Bing somehow acquires this information. 4) Search now appears in Bing.
I've highlighted the step that isn't really public information. The step that indicates to Bing that the link is interesting to someone, the step that they are acquiring through internet explorer! Total privacy violation, in my opinion.
My work here is dung.
Can Bing do exact text searching. And by exact I mean exact. Contrary to what Google thinks capitalization and special characters are important. Stop throwing them away Google!
I find being offended by me offensive.
How dare Google fake my honest search results for "hiybbprqag"
If I said that to my teacher when caught cheating, I doubt it would have had much sway.
Bad analogy. This isn't a test.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
According to TFA Google created a bogus search term and a honeypot webpage that didn't even contain the bogus search term, and wrote one-time custom code to force their engine to return the fake webpage as top result. Very soon after running some Google searches for the bogus term through IE with the Bing toolbar where Google returned the fake result, Bing started returning the same fake result. The only way that could happen is if they were copying Google's results without even examining why Google was returning them.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
But they aren't copying Google's results. They are spying on the user and finding out where they go. Your outrage is pointed the wrong way. If they searched for a junk phrase and clicked on a link on the 12th page, I suspect that would come up on Bing as the first result.
They are not spying on Google, they are spying on YOU!
Suffice to say, Google’s pretty unhappy with the whole situation, which does raise a number of issues. For one, is what Bing seems to be doing illegal? Singhal was “hesitant” to say that since Google technically hasn’t lost anything. It still has its own results, even if it feels Bing is mimicking them.
The same can be said when I copy a DVD, RIAA hasn't lost anything, they still have their own copy!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
If I said that to my teacher when caught cheating, I doubt it would have had much sway.
Bad analogy. This isn't a test.
Yeah! Everybody knows there's no such thing as cheating in business.
Silly rabbit! Ethics is for kids!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yeah! Everybody knows there's no such thing as cheating in business.
Silly rabbit! Ethics is for kids!
Of course there's ethics, and the ethical thing to do is to improve your offering to give the customers what they want. And since the search market is all aggregating third-party data to start with, I don't see why it should be 'wrong' to aggregate another aggregator's data. Don't we want an open Internet? How does calling meta-search 'cheating' make any more sense than calling pinging someone elses router 'theft'? Heck, in the before-time, there used to be entire search engines whose business model was *just* meta-search - anyone remember Dogpile?
Now, depending on your competitor to give you honest responses to your mechanical queries, that might be a weakness...
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Whether it violates Google's TOS (is there one?) is not as interesting a question as whether Bing's behavior constitutes a theft of services. On the face of it, this looks like a criminal activity.
Will