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Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the big-surprise-here dept.

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."

5 of 596 comments (clear)

  1. I agree by Haedrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I agree by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have to say that response made me chuckle

      Feigned insult followed by a sleight of hand in trying to associate Google's research with spammers, fraudsters, and criminals.

      What a terrible attempt at denial, it's not like they actually gave any evidence in their defence. They just pretended to be offended, and then tried to change the subject.

      I'm usually quite supportive of Microsoft because I honestly believe some of their products (e.g. Visual Studio) are best of breed, but this is just a joke. They seem to have been caught red handed and have no idea how to deal with it, they'd have been better off just staying quiet and letting the story fade into obscurity than crying out like this without being able to offer the slightest bit of real actual defence such as an explanation of why they ended up with an obscure search term in their search results that Google had manufactured on their search engine.

    2. Re:I agree by KarmaMB84 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They did offer a defense: it's the customer data. What happens is even if that customer data is only weighted as 0.001% as important as their other metrics, if that customer data is the ONLY data they have for these bogus search terms, this would happen. Google used obviously bogus search terms which have exaggerated the weighting of that data. In reality, that data might only move a page up or down a ranking on page 10 of a real search on Bing for all we know.

      Unless they come up with some actual evidence of real copying, this is a non-story. The #1 complaint around here all the time seems to be that Bing ISN'T giving the same results as Google so obviously that customer data isn't be weighted as important enough!

    3. Re:I agree by Haedrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Here's the thing.

      Search engines work like this

      Query ---> [S.E.] --> Results

      A clever search engine (one with high precision and recall) will give you the results you want. If you click on a result, you are assumed to have found that link useful. Google does that on its own search engine - and that's fair enough.

      Now if I capture "Query" and "Correct Result", I am basically using the other search engine's technology (which is used to supply that good result) and the result of all the data collection, research and whatever - in order to improve my search results. That's not a very fair game. If my search results heavily depend on Google's search results - I am piggybacking off them.

      I've nothing wrong with Google or Bing reading my searches I input into them and improving their product that way - I don't think its fair if the other company steals this data off other search engines.

  2. Re:Evidence and Explanation by tzhuge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sigh... they are acquiring association data from the tracked users. These fake users entered 'delhipublicschool40 chdjob' into the Bing search bar, then clicked on a link to 'a Credit Union website'. If they were copying directly from Google, then 100% of honeypot search terms should have worked...

    It's not like that explanation even makes MS look good per se, but I'm almost guaranteed to get modded down again.