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Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting"
eldavojohn writes "In a blog post titled 'Setting the Record Straight,' Microsoft's senior vice president of online services, Yusuf Mehdi, addressed Google's 'Bing Sting' operation saying, 'We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.' Mehdi went on to claim that Google engaged in 'click fraud' in order to rig up their alleged 'experiment.' Mehdi added, 'That's right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn't already know.' The struggle for Bing to usurp Google as number one in search continues."
To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.
Apparently Google's accusations are viewed by some as a backhanded compliment.
My work here is dung.
The fact that microsoft technology has advanced to the point of linking
"delhipublicschool40 chdjob"
to a Credit Union website
is simply showing how well they understand their potential customers, and has nothing to do with the fact that Google set them up at all.
Nice to see them finally getting their just desserts elewhere - Window Phone 7 is the Next of kin of the KIN and KIN2.
Or we could say "just deserts" because of the rate at which people have deserted Microsoft in the mobile space - down more than 50% from just a year ago. to just over 3%.
It makes no difference either way. Bing is a search engine. I don't care if all it did was run your query over to Google and search on it and return the results with its own front.
Welcome to the internet, whiners. Anyone ever use aggregate search engines before? Chill out.
I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
put away your e-peens. It's like reading a fan boy forum war over who would win in a fight, Superman or Goku...
Microsoft says the truth: a search of "Microsoft copies Google" in both Bing and Google yields different results.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Bing's search results are generally obtuse, mostly irrelevant and of exceedingly poor quality. Even Yahoo produces more cogent, relevant results. What a pathetic joke Microsoft and its "search engine" have become.
no text
Following on the heels of Yahoo's great success - Microsoft has abandoned using their own search technology in favor of Google's.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
Microsoft is shocked and indignant. How dare anybody suggest they might use any sort of underhanded tactics to compete with a rival?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Well Microsoft's response is sort of self-incriminating really. I mean the summary here basically paints their response as simple posturing and trying to get out of getting caught doing something they're not supposed to. "How dare you! We're better than them! We're smarter than they are! Those people are just trying to make us look bad! That's it, THEY'RE cheating! They're rigging tests and accusing us of things! They're trying to make US look bad because THEY know we're BETTER and it gets their pants all in a knot! Why would WE ever do something like that?!"
We have some of the best minds in the world... after Google, who invented some truly creative and innovative search methods, and then patented them. We have to find a completely different direction that works the same way, kind of, then improve on it.
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And Taco Bell vehemently denies it's "taco smeat" is 77% ground up old circus animals.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting" Well he has got to say that he cant admit to what is fact cus both his ass and his job are on the line , The MS method we cant do it so steal it and force our name on it ..
Smells like... astroturf.
They do spy on (sorry, gather 'click stream' data from) IE users (through IE itself, or one of its add-ons). Read those EULAs veeery carefully, folks!
Somehow this extremely relevant part of the story keeps getting skipped over whenever it's being told.
The 'click fraud' accusation is hilarious and quite arguably libelous as fraud (and click fraud) is a real criminal act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud
"Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.
Use of a computer to commit this type of Internet fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions, for example, as covered by Penal code 502 in California, USA."
(also claimed to be a felony at http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/click-fraud.html with claims of arrests.)
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
If, he hasnt used 'period' and 'full stop' and created enough dramatic pause, i wouldnt have believed him.
but now, i believe him, despite bing has been caught red handed, denied it without showing ANY proof, and then went on to accuse google of something totally irrelevant.
Read radical news here
We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance
Some of the best minds in the world??? Can't we ask them instead if they have any ideas about health, poverty or flying cars? It sounds like they're severely over-qualified to be working on a search engine.
Period. Full stop.
Welp, they said 'Full stop.' That means there's no sense arguing because the argument is over. (what? slashdotters like to do this)
Microsoft is using words that people search on Google and then sees links that people click from that Google search.
Google is using words that people associate with links, then uses those words to show links.
So, Google, shut the hell up.
He actually doesn't address why Google's search results were reappearing as Bing results, and focuses on only the synthetic queries in the sting, while Google pointed out real queries like "torsoraphy" were likely being served by Google results.
> What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know.
"Everyone knew we were extracting Google search results from our clickstream data and redisplaying them! So that's totally OK."
I can't think of a single thing Microsoft has done that was an original idea. Their entire business model seems to be "wait until someone establishes dominance in a marketplace, realize that marketplace could be profitable, put up a shitty copy of the dominant model and improve it just enough that people will use it because it's the default option leveraged with other Microsoft technologies." Well that and managing to install a tax on every computer built today. So yeah, this story is entirely plausible to me, and MIcrosoft will probably get away with it, too, despite those meddling kids.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This response is the usual BS handwaving from MS. There's a single paragraph which says essentially "er... they do click fraud!" without any real technical details or explanation. This is quite different from Google's posts, which are all very detailed about what they're doing and the results they're seeing. The rest of MS's article is marketing history ... not once is there real explanation of how they happen to have extremely obscure words pulling results for exactly what Google does. Just spin.
Thanks for trying, MS. You can't even come up with a technical response, and you want us to believe you can come up with a search engine?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Ok, I'm quite irked by this story, and I got modded troll a bunch of times by trying to point out that Google's experiment doesn't really support their accusation. I know some people will immediately label me a shill or apologist just for having a different opinion. What's stupid is I use Google search, and never Bing.
Anyways, the following is my understanding and some opinion. The secret knowledge of the search engine is the association of a search term and a result (usually a url). So to say that Bing is copying (I think 'cheating' might have the what was used, but copying is a lot of people's interpretation), implies they are acquiring Google's association data; conversely if the Bing search comes to the same result coincidentally, then they can't be 'cheating'. It wouldn't be that surprising if two search engines return same results for certain words. However, Google did their sting with fake terms... so obviously Bing is copying right?
So let's talk about their sting. They created (100?) honeypot search terms where a fake word would return a real link 'sss4yxyxy -> returns www.myresult.com'. Then they had 20 employees using IE and Bing toolbar w/ Google search and kept using these fake terms, then clicking the resulting link. Some time later, some of these fake terms return the same results on Bing.
A few things: Google employees opted into tracking w/ the Bing toolbar. (This is somewhat beside the point anyways, since Google isn't exactly in a position to point the finger about tracking.) Note that my understanding is that few of the (100?) honeypot terms actually worked on Bing.
The explanation from MS is that the Google employees gamed their user tracking mechanism to produce a result which makes it appear as if Bing is 'copying' Google. Basically they tracked the user search term, then the link they clicked through, and used this as part of the data for Bing. Google successfully gamed this because those terms are fake, and therefore the only data about them came from the sting.
So my opinion is that this isn't copying. If 100 of 100 honeypots showed up on Bing then that would support their accusation better. If their 20 employees only used Google normally from IE, without going through the toolbar, then that would strengthen the case. Without these, I have a hard time understanding how even the people at Google have rationalized their own accusation. Now maybe MS is lying and I'm a chump, but at least I'm taking the time to consider the evidence as presented.
What *new features* ended up in Windows 7 that happend to already exist in OSX:
Jump lists: Dock menus
Aero Peek: Exposé
File previews
Gadgets: Widgets
Sticky Notes: Stickies
Saved searches: Smart folders
Network shares automatically appearing in left sidebar
RSS feeds
Windows Disc Image Burner: Disk Utility
Taskbar makeover: Dock look and feel
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mac/top-10-features-microsoft-stole-mac-os-x-971¤t=2&last=11#slideshowTop
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
I'm not sure about this. It seems that Microsoft simply beat Google at their own game. The game Google is in is about advertising and data acquisition from users so it can do targeting, etc. Microsoft simply gathered data on searches (Google does the same; even more so if you are signed in). Microsoft used the data gathered on what users searched on to update their search results. They didn't go screen scrape anything from Google's servers. This seems like a good use of the data they collected - an attempt to return more relevant search result. If people are going to let them collect this stuff, they should probably use it in this way. Of course, I don't install the Bing spy toolbar or the Google spy toolbar. But if you do install it - why would you not want the data to go towards improving relevance of search? (In this case, they weighted "relevance" as "you clicked a link returned by this search from another search engine" so it "must" have been relevant to you).
"We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop."
That is funny, because you have just been *caught* copying results from your competitor. Period. Full stop. No chance this was a coincidence.
Now you seem to think because you copy it from Google result page in the users browser, and not from Google directly, you are not copying Google. But clearly you are. The user is "authorised" to use Google search results, after all that is the whole point of the search engine. You are not.
And I think this attitude is a shame, because some of the technologies from MS are actually pretty decent. Just search engine technology does not seem to be among those.
When I hear these declarations, for some reason I also hear two echoes in my mind:
- "Read my lips, no more taxes"
- "I did not had sexual relations with that woman..."
It all depends on what your definition of "is" is, right? (Or "sex", or "copy", for that matter). What did you expect MS to say, "we done goofed, send in the lawyers?"
As that would put them well above the %40 meat mark that they are currently operating under (%37 according to a current report)
Feigned outrage at "click fraud" aside, he agreed with Google.
In fact, he said Google was right on the money.
To be clear, they both agree on Microsoft's actions, but not on the meaning of it. Microsoft's use of anonymized click data meant that they observed the results that people were clicking on for these unusual searches. They also both agree that this is just one of many items Microsoft uses to determine relevance. Google even agrees that this isn't so much intentional copying, but an effect of the use of click data.
The Microsoft guy did give a little information on why the results improved so much at one time, which DOES somewhat soften the original cause for the accusation. In other words, our searches got better because we made them better, which is probably true.
Let's be clear: At NO POINT does the Microsoft guy deny the accusations. He confirms them.
Whether or not having your software notice what people are clicking on for your competitor's searches and considering that as an input to your search results constitutes copying their results is left to the reader.
So Google submits suggestive results via the Bing Toolbar, and when those results surface in Bing Search, Bing is at fault?! Ingenius! No one will be able to see through that! If it weren't for those dang kids...
Google has a long history of aggregating data it "borrowed" from other sources. First google news where they used slugs from newspapers to populate their pages. Then google books in which they made books available despite the publishers protests. Why someone shouldn't be allowed to use googles data, when they themselves have built their entire fortune on borrowing others data, is hypocrisy.
Football Odds
I suppose they should be glad Google just outed them rather than using this surreptitious sniffer to salt Bing's search results with a bunch of crap results.
Microsoft is a synonym of "shameless" and this does not surprised me at all. I am happy that they got caught.
Bing Travel has an interesting feature for tracking airline fares. In the short term it's pretty accurate and helps in the timing of buying airline tickets. Although, sometimes it'll say "wait fares steady or decreasing" and fares jump the next day. If you're traveling, you have to check at least twice a day - morning and night - to get an idea of the fares. The graph is handy to get an idea of what airlines do. For the route I fly during the Holiday's, I know the sweet spot is the first week of November for buying tickets.
Of course, extraordinary situations bring extraordinary prices - like in 2008 when Delta was going bankrupt. Their prices didn't follow any of the rules - they kept going down and down.
OK, here is how it works....You install the bing toolbar and opt-in to the program that says M$ can watch your search phrases and what you click. (Guess what...google did this and essentially said M$ could watch what they searched for and what they clicked)
Now you put some bogus search in to bing that gets no results, (i.e. the search has little relevant info already associated with it so there is no previous data inertia preventing easy manipulation of the bing ranking). Put the same search into google and get the honeypot page in the results and click on it.
Internally bing now has data that says your bogus search phrase has some association to the honeypot page. Since they had no associations for the bogus search phrase before, this one piece of data is now highly influential.
If google really wants to prove something....
1) do it on a box that they haven't opted-in to bing monitoring (maybe linux with chrome)
2) do it with an established search term that has large amounts of preexisting data
3) do searches on bing for bogus term and watch for those same bogus terms to show up in google searches (i.e. no click data, just google ranking farming)
My guess is google didn't actually think M$ was cheating, they were probably trying to do some competitive reverse engineering of bing's algorithms (no they don't want to copy bing but "knowing thy enemy" is never a bad strategy).
Perhaps Microsoft could be so kind to tell everyone how IE users can opt out of this tracking so we can all avoid "click frauding" Bing?
Google = About + Terms of Service
:-)
Bing = Legal
Maybe Bing doesn't go two levels deep?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So, not using Adblock is a crime? I mean, I consider advertising an immoral practice and I have never purchased anything I saw in an ad, and would never do that in the future. Then if some obnoxious ad got through my defenses and tricked me into clicking on it, I'd be committing a felony? Man, that sure is pretty harsh. And here we have people bragging how they support sites by not blocking ads (under the assumption that they block ads everywhere else), while in reality they are nothing but criminals.
Remember kids, not blocking ads can be a crime! Your life would be ruined and spent in the pound-me-in-the-you-know-what federal penitentuary. Be safe! Surf smart! Use adblock!
Here's my observation based on use of both search engines:
MS doesn't copy Googles results. If they did, Bing would actually return useful results.
When I need to search Microsoft's Knowledge Base, I use Google. Bing returns useless info half of the time for me. When your competing search engine returns better results that your own, on your own website, you can't consider yourself having a useful search engine.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
feeling is mutual
Copping Google, would be if before displaying search result in Bing, Bing rand a Google search to help it rank it's results.
What Microsoft is actually doing (as far as I can tell) is saying "hey IE users, would you do us a solid by telling us what sites you found relevant when you run a search query through our search bar?". And then using the data collected that way to improve their Bing results.
It's not copying. It is however leveraging their market share in web browsing to gain a competitive edge in a related market (web search results). This may or may not be ethical (depending where you stand on the finner points of anti competitive behavior), but it's not "cheating" in the sense most people seem to think (the classic "hey Lisa what did you get for #5?" sense).
We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop.
Parsing that carefully, that is not what Microsoft was accused of. So, in effect, Microsoft is saying that they did not do something that they were not accused of.
It's Microsoft's typical tactic, try to move the discussion over to a slightly different topic when Microsoft is caught with its hand in the cookie jar.
More disturbing for me during this whole mess is the fact that Microsoft is capturing my mouse clicks and visited links when I am using the browser, and sending that captured data back to Microsoft.
They did offer a defense: it's the customer data
Let me see, they put a routine in the customer's computer that collects what the customer types and what is sent to the screen when the customer uses a third party application.
That is usually considered a crime, not a defense. It would be the weirdest form of alibi if someone claimed he could not have robbed a bank because at that exact moment he was murdering someone.
says the cookie crumb covered child.
...until I read this response.
Google "sting" was interesting, but they made more out of it than it was.
But to call Google's experiment click fraud is just as juvenile. The fact is that Google had a really good point. Their "sting" used nonsense words, but they originally noticed something fishy when looking at results for a genuine query: tarsorhaphy, which is a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy. Google recognized the misspelled word, and Bing did not, but still returned a page with the correct spelling as the top result. They apparantly did so by piggy-backing on Google's results. Whether you agree with Google that this is an underhanded practice that should stop or not, Google was well within their rights to point it out.
Period. Full stop.
I get those words from my girlfriend once a month.
[...] I try and use Bing quite often (just to be different - same reason I won't buy an iPhone, but do own several Macs), but I find I get the results I'm after with Google more so. [...]
Wow yeah, not having an iPhone totally makes you different (there's gotta be close to 6 billion people with the same idea though). That really expresses your individuality. Now if you crawled around on your hands and knees, well that might get you noticed as some who is different.
If I have allowed Microsoft to examine my 'click stream' for the purpose of 'search optimization', what stops them with Google? What if they start snooping around with transactions between myself and my on-line stock broker? Could they conceivably front run my purchase decisions (or sell that data to high speed traders)?
Have gnu, will travel.
A quick search turns up Internetworks browser adding tabs in 1994, iBrowse in 1999, and then Opera in 2000. So they did not really "start" the use of tabbed browsing, they were just the first one to catch on in the mainstream, well if you call Opera mainstream which is debatable.
of Microsoft's deep pockets. They threw millions of Office dollars at Bing. So it's true Google has to acknowledge Bing, but it's for all the wrong reasons
Also, and I mentioned this in the first thread about this, people have been conditioned by marketing to desire the 'genuine article'. Gap, Gucci, Levis, you name it. Being label a cheap knockoff would kill the Bing brand fast.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Google created search terms for sites and terms that do not exist on the internet. The only place they do exist is in google's own search engine. How could Bing generate a response if it was't hitting up Google for their response?
They did offer a defense: it's the customer data.
Not exactly. You wrap up what they have done in nebulous terms like, "oh they use use customer data if it's the only input".
But let's consider what ACTUALLY is being done to make this work.
The Big bar needs to know the user is searching Google in order to parse out the fact the user is searching, and exactly what is being searched for.
The Big Bar additionally need to either parse the result after the user searches or understand when the user clicks on a link from a returned search results.
In both cases they have code specifically parsing Google activity by the user.
Basically what they have is a mechanical turk system they don't have to pay for. If some search engine went up with results that were gathered using Amazon's mechanical turk and asking the people there to search Google for a term, would that not raise some flags?
If you are copying from a guy who is copying from someone else, how is that not still cheating?
I don't think it's illegal at all, but I do think it's pathetic they can't get search results good enough to not need this crutch. I just switched to Bing as my primary search engine a few weeks ago, and frankly over time I slowly grew to realize the search results are just not that great... which makes you wonder just how much of the results you DO get come from this mechanism vs. real Bing algorithms. I was thinking about switching back anyway, but this whole episode just capped it for me and I'm back to Google for my primary search engine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop.
but later on he says:
As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.
a clear example of PR speak in action.
After all, IE does not necessarily know you are talking to the REAL google. You could remap the dns record locally for a little fun. Then create your OWN honeypot search terms. If enough people did it, you could have BING begin responding to certain mispellings to bring up some very interesting search results.
It sounds like it took very little effort to affect the page rankings on BING.
The Bing results are not based on Google's returned results. They are based on the fake data generated by the Google engineer showing that a user searching for those search terms then visited those sites. For the purpose of this test, that site would end up on top of Bing's results even if it were the 558th link in Google's results - if that was the only one the Google engineer clicked on.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Name one completely unique product _from anyone_ in the past 50 years of technology, which isn't based on prior tech.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Would Googles 'click fraud' have still worked on machines without the Bing Toolbar installed and enabled to send data back to Microsoft?
Not the question being asked. What was asked was how MS could get Google searches. They can do that with the Bing Bar checkbox.
This is not a question about whether MS have asked people to get google searches, merely how they could.
The missing matter seems to be between the ears...
The inquirer has another article where Medhi says the setup a honey pot! How preposterous! More seriously the question arises: If bing relies so heavily on users utilizing google, then what exactly does bing add to enhancing search results? Why would a user use bing specifically, and why not just use google?
Mehdi then claimed that Google's experiments were deliberately set up to fool Bing, labelling them a "honeypot attack". ... Mehdi wasn't finished with denigrating Google's work, saying the tactic is also known as "click fraud" and that it is "the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results".
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry I'm impressed at Google's ingenuity of adapting an old map maker's concept (paper towns) into a new era and only mildly surprised at MicroSoft's response. Their audacity is astounding.
Google = About + Terms of Service Bing = Legal Maybe Bing doesn't go two levels deep? :-)
Bing = Privacy -> terms of use
so to add to the complication of bing, which one contains the legalese we need to determine if you are allowed to be used as a mule?
The problem with the scenario you're spinning is that the toolbar that collects this information is Microsoft's Bing toolbar... a toolbar that adds a Bing search bar to IE.
That's important, because your theory makes the assumption that all users of this toolbar are Google users... but why would they install the Bing toolbar?
Because they bought a computer from a vendor that has an agreement with Microsoft to preload the Bing toolbar as part of its shovelware (from a quick web search, it looks like, at a minimum, Dell, HP, Toshiba, and Lenovo do this.)
I noticed that the sites that they force ranked were not plain HTML sites. Sites like RIM and the others will have ads on their site. These ads definitely do looking at the referring URL to gather information. That information is sold in many different places. It's reasonable to assume that Microsoft could be buying this referral information as well and using it as index information in Bing. Couldn't this be an alternative to them actually copying?
For them to really see if Bing is copying they should have used HTML sites with no ads and no referral information gathering.
Here's how I parse this:
I'm not sure how because they are pulling the results through someone else, it's ok. That's like saying because I didn't pirate this piece of software directly, but downloaded it from a pirate site, it's fine.
What proof is Microsoft supposed to offer? "Here's a look at how our search engine works, see, no cheating!" is just not going to work because A: that information is proprietary and very, very important to maintaining good search results, B: Nobody would understand it, and C: Even if they did that, what would that prove?
Well, nothing, because if they actually presented how the search works, it would reveal exactly what Google points to, as there is no other plausible explanation for how Bing reproduces Google results that Google produces through its spelling correction engine than that it uses the combination of Google search terms and results (whether its all the results or just the clicked-on results for those search terms doesn't matter) that it gathers from Bing Toolbar to associate results with search terms in Bing.
Flat denial with no alternative explanation for the evidence combined with hyperventilating misdirection about "click fraud" is not a particularly convincing argument, but its what Microsoft is using here, not because if they actually weren't doing what they are accused of they couldn't do better, but because they actually are doing what they are accused of, so they have nothing else to use.
In fairness, how should they prove that Google's accusations are false?
At a minimum, if they didn't do what they were accused of, they should present a plausible alternative explanation for the results of Google's experiments. (I would say they could provide some reason to doubt that Google's experiments produced the results Google claimed, but since they've acknowledged that with their click-fraud characterization of the Google methodology, it's pretty clear that they don't doubt the results themselves, so that would obviously be a dishonest PR gambit.)
But I think its pretty clear that they do exactly what Google has said they do, so what they really should do is fess up to it, and present the argument for why it isn't a bad thing. Stand by your decisions rather than denying them.
There's no way outside of reviewing Bing's algorithm and logs how many real search results are "powered by Google".
Why not do the following: Set up a handful of web pages that have unique terms on them. Configure the web servers serving these pages to either ignore or provide slightly different content to the Bing search bots. Have the Google minions perform the same honeypot effort and spend lots of time searching and clicking on these pages. If a Bing search turns up with these pages or returns the Bing specific content as summary info, then it would be clear the Bing is cheating.
Bing is responding to falsified click-stream data
Quite obviously bing watches the results that the google searches of it's users generate merely to copy them. It's not innovation, its plagiarism.
This "issue" is like having a bunch of people agree to answer the same way on a survey. In this case Google set it up so their employees were the only ones answering the survey, so the results only show how the employees answered.
I think what Microsoft is collecting with their toolbar is perfectly reasonable. In short, they're using users who opt-in to train their algorithms. There is nothing sneaky about this - the Bing toolbar installer says, on the first install panel (where you also choose your language),
Opting out is as easy as clearing a checkbox.
Google employees installed the Bing toolbar, opted in to data collection, loaded their database with results for unique, nonsensical search terms and then clicked on those results using IE with the Bing toolbar. Since the terms were unique the clicked results became the only data points associated with those terms and thus showed up in the Bing results.
This is no more nefarioius then a restauranteur eating at a competitor's restaurant on a Saturday night and noticing what other patrons are ordering. You find out what the people want then give them what they want.
No copying was involved. Just a bunch of Google employees sitting around telling Microsoft (through the Bing toolbar), "when we search for [unique nonsense], we find [Google's preloaded link] to be the most useful result". Bing was collecting the "wisdom of the crowd" but Google gamed it so the crowd was made up of only Google employees.
The inestimable Nate Silver referees:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/how-much-does-bing-borrow-from-google/
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
I'm not defending Microsoft, here, just saying I find it ironic that Google is crying "foul" when Google's whole business model is to appropriate other peoples' data without permission. They didn't get permission to cache and re-serve everybody's web pages before everybody knew how to set up a robots.txt. They didn't get permission from authors before they started scanning, archiving, and distributing for free their copyrighted books in their Google Books initiative. And they sure as anything didn't get permission before they drove around collecting everybody's wi-fi information. Their ads track us around the Internet without permission- we've had to opt-out (and opt out again anytime their opt-out cookie gets cleared). They didn't get permission before they launched Google Buzz and released all kinds of personal info. They didn't get my permission before re-setting my you-tube channel privacy settings to make my information public that I had explicitly set to private.
The only reason they get away with the things they do is because the vast majority of people find being able to use their search engine and free email enticing enough to overlook the fact that they have blatently violated copyright laws and misused private information any number of times. Oh, and because they claim they "Do no evil" and people are ignorant enough to believe it.
Google News, Google Books, even Street View have opt-out mechanisms. And for Google Books, where the copyright owner hasn't stepped forward, the book is "available" only as a title and a few snippets from the query. There is content in the world, and Google is indexing it.
Contrast this to what Bing did. Google's robots.txt has explicitly opted out of other search engines crawling the search results, which is a database of (query, list of url). So Bing went around this by copying IE users' (query, url) pairs anyway. It would have been fine to just add the URLs that people visit to Bing's webpages to crawl, but associating the query with the Google result URL certainly is not OK.
As read on twitter: I wish they copied Chrome and called it Internet Explorer.
Period. Full stop.
Just out of curiosity...does anyone here actually use Bing? Hell...I don't know anyone that uses it. I mentioned it to a couple of friends that aren't stupid and relatively more 'net savvy than most users out there...and they'd not even really heard of it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
Okay so he can say they don't steal clicks but it would be better to show the actual code behind the search engine and prove it.
The Google honeypot placed just one result on the end user's page.
So Google returns a single (deliberately bogus) link in response to a nonsense query term.
The critical question is this: Did the Google employee who tried that search then click on the resulting link?
* IF YES: Then Microsoft could (with some small justification) claim that they are mining the user's expertise in picking a website that matched what (s)he was looking for. Since the Google employee had given permission to Microsoft to do exactly that, you can justify what they did. If the user had entered the search term and said "Well, that's a pretty useless result" and NOT clicked on it - then (in this scenario) Microsoft wouldn't have used the association. It's OK for Microsoft to improve their search engine using the end-user's brain because they got prior permission to do exactly that.
* IF NO: Then Microsoft must have used software that's insinuated into IE to peek at the results that came up from the Google search and sent that back to home-base. You'd have to say that this most certainly is a case of using Google's expertise in picking a website that matched that search term. That would be horribly unethical - downright sleazy in fact.
So what happened? Did the Google employees click on the honeypot link or not? Careful reading of the statement from Google fails to reveal which of these two possibilities it was.
I'm no fan of Microsoft - but isn't it possible that in the small number of those 100 tests in which M$ came up with the honeypot in their results, the Google employee HAD clicked on the link - and in the majority of cases, they did not? Even if Google gave them instructions NOT to click on the link - isn't it likely that a few of them failed to read the memo?
We may never know - but I think there is room for doubt and therefore (although it greatly pains me to say so) M$ might actually be on firm moral ground here.
Bottom line though - NEVER give anyone permission to do anything with your data unless you know exactly what, why and how. There is no penalty to saying "no".
Google has been using internal redirect URLs to track clicks since day one. You usually don't notice them since they only get used on a low percentage of result pages. Nowadays with the javascripted completion and instant search it is less of a necessity for them but it's still around.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This claim by Google was to divert attention from the big story, which is that Google web results are full of spam, and Google's business model depends on that. When organic search works right and takes the user where they want to go, the search engine makes no money. That's what the panel at Big Think was supposed to be about. The press has picked up on this, and Google is trying to keep it from becoming the main story.
"Google makes almost a third of its money from Adsense ads. Taking those adsense spam sites off the search results will cost Google some revenue. If it is 1% of their Adsense revenue, that is $25 million a quarter or $100 million/year. That's nothing to sneeze at. The dollar amount could be much higher."
"Most likely the fixes will only be forthcoming if and when they start to lose searchers and/or people stop clicking on the ads. Which doesn't seem to be happening. According to a Media Post article this week on U.S. paid search budgets (which was quoting from the "Efficient Frontier Q4 2010 U.S. Digital Marketing Performance Report"), paid clicks on Google rose 8% year-on-year."
It's not a technical problem. Search spam can be stopped. (Blekko does it, and we (SiteTruth) do it.) Nor are third-party ads on other sites essential to running a search engine. Most of the revenue comes from ads on the search pages themselves. But Google is addicted to that extra revenue from junk AdSense pages, and has created and financed a whole ecosystem of crap.
Bing could potentially do better than Google. Bing doesn't get AdSense revenue, so they don't have Google's business model problem. Bing doesn't, though. Bing still sends users to sites full of Google AdSense ads, and their Bing Places entries have phony business entries. Bing has a web spam problem too, but it's not making them any money.
Genuine articles is why I use Bing.
When I search for device drivers, Google returns pages of SEO/registry optimization landing page spam in front of any useful results. Bing usually returns multiple relevant links on the first page.
When I search for local notables, Google floats links to many copies of the same information to the top, prioritizing the loudest outdated consensus. Bing consolidates that to bring new and minority reports to the surface.
If anything, Google has become the venue for cheap knockoffs where quantity substitutes for quality.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
... except for that whole thing about it being a logical fallacy.
this reminds me of an argument i usually observe with younger programmers and script kiddies, source code copying - without previous example one cannot learn or develop new innovations.
we take existing data, regurgitate it, and call it our own, something that google and microsoft do very well with ALL of their product offerings.
more power to both of their companies, whoever can "steal" "copy" "learn" whatever you want to call it from others contributions and their competitors. and still appear "good" in the eyes of their target consumers, as long as there is profit to be made it is rewarded, regardless of moral and human reactions.
both google and microsoft acquire many start-up companies and augment their technologies and call it their own, does google voice ring a bell?, does powerpoint display any ideas?
i wouldn't be surprised if the most adamant trolls on bing's blog comments are actually google and microsoft "so-called" engineers going at it back and forth, defending the companies that pays their salaries.
This is yet another example of the long, predictable history of Microsoft. They are not an innovative company. They know it. So they copy the success of others and then use their financial power and Windows entrenchment to make it popular and profitable. And sometimes it's even a great product.
Examples? Amiga --> Windows, Lotus --> Office, Word Perfect --> Word (remember the Word Perfect emulation mode?), PS2 --> Xbox, Hotmail --> MSN-Mail, Java --> C#, Wii --> Kinect, Google docs -> Office Online, Google Search -> Bing.
However, if you think about it what has this company invented? Is there ANYTHING except a working methodology at making money off the ideas of others? Coming out with a better, similar product than a competitor is perfectly fair and the basis of competition and every company does it. Google certainly didn't invent the search engine, but they did take it in an entirely new direction that people liked. Most companies of the size of Microsoft have a long list of things they did first, that they invented. It disturbs me that there is next to nothing that Microsoft can claim that they created or revolutionized. They occasionally try--if you count things like the Kin--but never does it create such a wave of excitement and change like, for example, the iPhone did.
It appears most of you google fanboys don't get the point.
User behavior is an important aspect to search relevancy and Microsoft apparently collects user behavior data through some browser plugins. Now, if a person's browser makes a get request that contains bladdabladdabooboobam as a query parameter (regardless of if it was a google search) and the next page the user visits is a credit union website, there is an association between bladdabladdabooboobam and the credit union website. The fact that it was a google search result producing this user behavior is not material.
When there is no other information about the search term bladdabladdabooboobam, and the only piece of information you have to work with is coming from user behavior data, it becomes the sole determining factor in the Bing search results.
The completely innocent mechanism by which this could happen makes Google look childish even making the accusation.
But the fact remains that looking at how customers use the competition (especially the frontrunner) is prevalent in all industries, and is a really smart idea from a business standpoint, and only serves to benefit your customers
It would be one thing if they looked at Google's search results and used that to attempt to reverse-engineer Google's algorithm. Then you might have a point. But to just build an algorithm around weighting results based on whether they're high on Google's list is not reverse engineering. It's copying.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
You could call it "copying" or "stealing" or "improving customer experience" or whatever but the fact is that Google has accurately described how to bump up search results on Bing by following the steps. So soon Bing will be full of search engine spam. And the engineers at google will feel _really_ bad about that. Snicker.
Right. Google challenged Bing to a no-win scenario and now is getting all upset and accusing Bing's winning strategy as "cheating" because it didn't fall within their box of how they thought search engines were supposed to operate.
I'm looking forward to the launch of Boogle!
But their algorithm makes no reference whatsoever to the location of the result on Google's list, it ONLY references whether the user found it relevant enough to click on. It could be the first result or the fiftieth, Microsoft neither knows nor cares.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Indeed, and they don't even really need to 'spy' on Google at all.
All they need to do is take their own search results, and see what queries did 'poorly', aka, returned results far down the page.
Then run the same queries on Google, see if Google did better.
If so, there's something to look at.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's a shame Google didn't go the extra mile and publish snarf results showing the phone home...
Does Google toolbar do the same thing?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Bing is not watching the results. It is watching the clicks generated by the user. In this particular experiment, it wouldn't matter whether the particular link was 1st or 500th in Google's results - if that was the only one the users clicked, it would end up as #1 on Bing's results for the term and none of the other results would.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It would seem that the bigger issue at hand is defining copying of data returned to the users browser as "improving user experience". Generally that phrase describes such things as reporting problems (bugs, etc.). By crossing this line, it is difficult to trust that such feature is definitely not collecting other search results, including those on a corporate site, regardless of whether that data ends up on bing.com. A line has been crossed.
... that they can't do the same thing. I mean, who can THEY copy from?
Of course, all the MS hate on slashdot means no one will admit that this is actually a pretty clever idea. People can scream "cheating" all they want, analyzing clickstream data is something everybody's been doing for years, not the least of which is Google, and it's legal.
But what's not obvious is that this can eventually result in Bing actually improving beyond Google in some ways. Think about it: MS is listening to their user's actions and correlating search terms (and probably more) with URLs clicked. That the users happen to be using Google and clicking on results is just because Google is a very popular website. But this technique would work on pretty much every search page ever, not just Google. Even sites not indexed by any crawlers and private intranet search pages (assuming sysadmins have neglected to opt-out). Which can extend Bing's reach to places even Google can't. Which could make Bing potentially superior to Google.
Of course, Google can get off their fake moral high horse and get Chrome to do the same thing. But being the market leaders, they won't be able to do this without privacy activists screaming bloody murder.
>The struggle for Bing to usurp Google as number one in search continues
They should just be content for second best
Isn't this the same software company that created an "Alliance" to thwart software copying?
Ah yes, the chance to kick Bing, who can miss that :)
Alas, while checking their license for the rant on this search "scandal" I found this paragraph:
(emphasis mine)
There you go, tracking of "your interaction with Bind and different search engines" (including but doesn't say it's limited to, thank you lawyers). So yes, they're tracking it, throwing it into whole pot, and then re-use on Bing results. Anything that Google returned and user clicked on would be tainted thanks to this clause. You clicked on it (after installing toolbar), it got added. Ta-da!
I wonder what'd happen if we actually got to the ideal state of search engines, where all search engines converge to some "best" search result (given identical search request context)?
Hyperom.com
Bing does not copy Google's results. It embraces and extends.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
1. Publish marginally useful freebie BlingApp with a EULA
2. BlingApp is a keylogger. Whoever installed it has accepted the EULA so that's OK.
3. Use BlingApp to sniff out valuable user data.
4. Antivirus company(*) uses a script to prove that you're keylogging.
5. Antivirus company are the bad guys because they committed "click fraud" and tainted your valuable data!
(*) So in this case it was a competitor. Same diff.
What is "Bing"?
xoda.org
Others?
I ask you: Would Microsoft be sneaky, tricky, dishonest, or adversarial? Is Microsoft a company on the way down that needs to steal from others?
Well? I'm just asking.
Slashdot: The URL of a comment no longer takes you to the comment.
This *only* worked because Google chose terms that nobody had ever searched before: "fdsfhasjhdajhhj". {...} Now if you can show this technique works with a search term like, say, "hamburger"-- THEN you'll have an accusation.
That's actually how the whole story started. Or perhaps, we could say search term like the misspelled "hmabruger". (The initial article speaks about misspelling "tarsorrhaphy").
It started with Google engineer noticing how Bing give the exact same results as Google for misspelled words. But without applying any actual spelling correction. (There's no "hmabruger - did you meant 'hamburger' ?" header on Bing).
As Google know that they are the best and almost only with an efficient spell-correction algorithm built into their search engine, they though that maybe Bing was somehow mining their knowledge. They (correctly) though that Microsoft may be saving "term->URL" pairs for Bing, and devised a complicated method to test this hypothesis.
They're *adding* that particular term->URL combination to their database.
What is fundamentally morally wrong, is that they aren't actively spidering the web to generate that pair. It's not some bot scanning all the web content.
Instead, whenever some user performs a search on some concurrent search engine, Microsoft stores the best (as in what the user clicked on) "term->URL" pairs which are coming from the result of another search engine.
Google spends lots of time devising their great search engine. That enables them to be able to give meaningful answers to tail searches. Including misspelled search words, etc.
Bing comes, spies its users for term->URL pairs they click on Google, and gains the capability to answer the same misspelled searches as Google without any real work being done behind.
Another way to think about it :
- The day when Google stops operating, or the day they successfully prevent Bing from mining their result, Bing will lose its spell-correction capability, as they won't have a way to generate the needed term->URL pairs themselves.
This is proving that Bing isn't increasing any knowledge. Merely just free-riding on someone else's know-how.
Adding a term to a search engine's database is not "copying" by any reasonable definition of the word
Well, ok. "Bing is *mining* the know-how and results of Google to provide results for less frequent terms themselves without having to do the hardwork."
That's a more accurate version of what's happening.
And is also less clear to the less technical readers to which the initial article was geared.
And journalists don't like long and confusing title.
And the mental image of a student leaning over his neighbor's shoulder to copy the answers is a good one to understand what's morally at stake.
It wasn't a white paper published in some peer-reviewed scientific journal. It was an article on website about search engines.
when Google looks at what sites my blog links to to determine PageRank, it's "copying" my blog.
Fundamentally, yes Google *does* copy data from your blog when its bot is spireding it. But there's some key differences.
- As the author of your blog, you're in charge of what is done with its content. If you don't want it being used by search-engines web crawler, you have a battery of tools at your disposal ("robots.txt", "nofollow" and the likes). So if you think that Google is profiteering out of your work to create this collection of links, you're free to tell them to stop, and Mr. Googlebot will go on on someone else's blog.
- Microsoft is gathering these "term->URL" pairs *from* Google results, but are taking them by spying *on users* who have decided to opt-in (and knowing Microsoft, these users might not even really know they've opted in). The decision to mine this data (term->URL pairs generated from Google) is made based on the decision of a 3rd par
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Agreed. The real problem (and why you were modded "Troll") is that 99.9% of the general public and 95% of Slashdot readers don't understand how search engines work, and they certainly don't understand how URL click data might be used to adjust index relevance. And that ignorance is precisely what makes this PR move by Google so brilliant, because Microsoft is fighting a losing battle trying to explain why this complicated algorithm isn't "stealing".
By clicking on those links and sending the data back to Microsoft (they opted-in on purpose), the Google engineers intentionally trained Bing to associate those terms with the clicked URL. It doesn't matter whether the site containing the URL was Google.com and full of search results or MyStupidHobby.org and full of forum posts. Microsoft's algorithmic explanation here is that, when Bing analyzes this user click data, it will index the URL clicked by the user (if it wasn't indexed already), and associate with that URL any terms it can parse out of the previously visited URL itself (not the page). Later, when queried for the unusual terms (i.e., "tail query"), Bing will check its index, and if the "user click" signal is the only available relevant match, then it only has that one answer to display.
The fact that this experiment only worked for a few of the queries shows that the "user click" ranking signal must not be given much weight when there are any other ranking signals available for better results. (Many folks are mistaking this defense with, "we only copied a few results" which is NOT the same thing!)
There are several ways the Google engineers could have boosted their case to make it reasonable.
So Microsoft's explanation is very plausible. By the same token, it seems likely that this episode is a well-crafted Google PR stunt, and it seems to be working quite well even amongst a technical audience. Which means that, sadly, knowledge of the underlying technology here (marginal improvement of result relevance based on user click interest) is losing out to the typical politics surrounding Microsoft...
And a search of "Microsoft sucks" also yields *much* different results.
I have an even better idea!
Microsoft should change their toolbar, so every time a user clicks on anything, toolbar also requests a page from Microsoft that contains a query sent to Bing by another user. Then this user's browser performs a search on Google, and sends the results to Microsoft, so it can return them to the user who requested it!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The only innovation the management of Microsoft ever made was to steal and then deny....
When has M$ ***EVER*** admitted to doing anything wrong? They could have been (metaphorically) standing over a dead body, weapon in hand, covered in blood, had 50 credible witnesses, a half-dozen video cameras, and a high-speed holographic image recorder ALL trained on them, after screaming "I, Misro$oft, am going to kill you, [victim's name] with this [weapon] right now!" and when someone said "OMG, you KILLED him!" they'd say, "Nope. Wasn't us. That was someone else."
The *USER* sends data to Bing saying "Hey I searched for this and I clicked on this". The fact that they search on Google or Yahoo or Altavista or Website Foo whatever doesn't make a difference. Maybe the User is unaware that they are sending this data and perhaps MS could be more explicit in their EULAs. But they maybe Google should make explicit that they spy on *everything* users type in the search/address bar in chrome (even if they are not using google services) or if they install the google toolbar...
Their example "tarsorrhaphy" isn't relevant because Wikipedia has a redirect on that spelling-- Bing probably simply got the page due to the Wikipedia redirect, without even realizing the spelling was incorrect. (Which matches what the Google engineer saw.)
Check the edit history of wikipedia's redirect.
It didn't exist back when the screen shot were taken. So what the Google engineer saw was indeed Bing results point to a word spelled differently, without any explanation given and any other way to understand why.
The redirect was created later, and at that moment, Google started showing the Wikipedia redirect too (without spelling correction), and in that case the short line under the results show it as a redirection. Now the word is slowly starting to get associated with articles covering the incident.
But at the moment this operation started, the only place on the web where "torsoraphy" and "tarsorrhaphy" are associated is the Google spell correcter.
The sting operation doesn't say anything about Bing stealing spelling correcting data.
No, indeed. The idea was to find a way to synthetically prove that Bing records keyword->URL pairs, and uses them as-is for very rare keywords. (The Goolge's results are the only single indicator for these searches).
All it proves is that Bing associates searched terms with clicked links, one of the thousands of indicators it uses to determine when to index a term, and something pretty much everybody (at least in the industry) knew it did already.
...except that, in the case of rare keywords (be it synthetic like in the sting, or real rarely occurring words), there aren't 999 other indicators. The almost single only indicator is the keyword->URL pair that Bing got by spying on users using Google.
So basically, Bing is handing out results for which it didn't do any work, simply passing off the result learned from Google and without citing source. That's morally wrong. That's flagrant plagiarism. Bing shouldn't either rely on these pairs when they are the only remaining signal (as with rare keywords), or should give credit to the source of information (as meta-search engines usually do).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The difference between what Bing is doing to Google and your examples in arts, scientific paper, etc. is the same as the difference between "plagiarism" and "citation".
Both are cases of using someone else's output, but only one is actually honest, the other is trying to pass someone else's work as your own.
There's nothing wrong in search engines gathering information from other engines... as long as this process is mentionned.
Meta-search engines clearly states the results of which engine they are aggregating. As another example, torrent search engines like Torrentz.com clearly state which torrent site are its result coming from.
Bing passes these results as their own, even if in these cases (both the synthetic keywords as during the sting, and the rare keywords (like misspelling) like those who sparked the engineer's curiosity) Google is the only source of information Bing is using.
If a scientist had attempted this in a paper (basing an entire article solely on results produced by someone else, and not citing it in the bibliography), it wouldn't have been very welcomed by the scientific community.
It's rather ironic that it today is referred derisively to as "piracy".
Mashups & Mixes are a nice example. These things considered as "piracy" by the **AA. But they both contain new work (from the artist combining them) and cite the source of the samples used in the process. So they shouldn't be considered morally wrong.
On the other hand Disney regularly passes 3rd party or public domain ideas as their own and in some situation (like Lion King vs. Kimba the White Lion) it starts to border on dishonesty in my book, but it's perfectly acceptable for the **AAs. (They should either have mentioned "inspired by..." in the credits. Or they should have less heavily drawn from it. There's a difference between a nod and a ripoff and Disney isn't far from crossing that line).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're not really making sense.
Google never said that M$ was copying their database.
You haven't disproved anything, all you're doing is bickering over the words used.
"Basically they tracked the user search term, then the link they clicked through, and used this as part of the data for Bing."
That line is 100% of the point. That is exactly what Bing are doing, exactly what Google is accusing them of doing, and exactly what Google proved they are doing.