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."

Comments

Response from Another VP

[eldavojohn]

When I submitted the story, I had not noticed an additional response from Harry Shum, VP of Bing, who said:

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.

Re:Response from Another VP

[sjames]

User with Bing spyware bar searches google. Bing gets record of term searched on and the results of that search. Bing adds to database.

Re:Response from Another VP

[hairyfeet]

What seems weird to me is that normally libertarian /. seems to be missing an angle on this story, and it is that it is the USERS data and NOT Google's so frankly it is none of their business. If I opt in to share my searches with MSFT, Yahoo, hell Dr Tongue's 3D house of searches, it is MY data and MY searches and I'll do what I please with it.

So I don't see what Google has a right to bitch about when it is the user that chose to share THEIR searches with Bing and that frankly isn't Google's no matter how much they like to treat user's data as their own property.

Re:Response from Another VP

[SadButTrue]

I think they may very well have gotten all libertarian if google had tried, or indeed still does try, to involve the court system.

I think the way most of us, and at the very least I, view this as a simple case of dirty pool (think that may have been in one of the google posts) .

I think what is mostly being missed in all of the talk about this is the fact that if we take Microsoft assertion, that what google did was click fraud, at face value then we are left with the fact that one person manually clicking on a random string can push RIM's home page to the top slot in Bing's results for that string. Google went out of their way to say that they never use user clicks for ranking. I suspect this is because of how absurdly easy such a system is to game.

SO WHAT

[Apocryphos]

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.

Re:SO WHAT

[GameboyRMH]

It's not copyright infringement, but it is (unrepentant) financially-motivated plagiarism, which is far worse in my book.

Also Microsoft basically performed a software-based MITM between users and Google - IIRC they notify users about this in one of their EULAs, but Google might want to ask their lawyers about that.

Re:I agree

[aug24]

Next thing to do is for someone, maybe someone 'anonymous' to use the same trick to spam the rankings. Simply set up a proxy so that when you hit google for xxx, it returns a page containing yyy then click on it. Automate. Repeat.

Challenge: get Goatse on the first page for George W or T Blair, perhaps, or at least the dictionary page for 'idiot'.

Justin.

Evidence and Explanation

[tzhuge]

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.

Pot calling kettle black

[bjourne]

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.