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

I agree

[Haedrian]

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.

Re:I agree

[Xest]

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.

Re:I agree

[KarmaMB84]

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!

Re:I agree

[Haedrian]

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.

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.

Re:Evidence and Explanation

[tzhuge]

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.