Slashdot Mirror
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?
It just made the decision to copy from Google.
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
No, but it is cheating if you lash your Toyota to the Ford then claim better fuel economy.
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.
You really didn't RTFA, did you? Google set up FALSE, or FAKE results, and Bing copied them right onto their own search pages. Bing wasn't just watching Google - they outright stole Google's faked data. In the car analogy, Toyota would have watched to see what Ford was building, but Ford would have caught on, and set up a parking lot full of plywood cars without motors. Toyota then stole the fake cars, rebranded them as Toyota, and sold them on the market. Geeez. Microsoft fanbois will go to extremes to justify anything and everything that Microsoft does.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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