Slashdot Mirror
Google's Search Copying Accusation Called 'Silly'
itwbennett writes "Google's Bing sting, reported in Slashdot just days ago and subsequently denied by Microsoft, is now being called 'silly' and 'petty' by search industry analysts and execs. The reason: it would be impossible for Microsoft to use the copied results to reverse engineer Google's search algorithms. And in fact it is more likely that Microsoft was conducting competitive research. Charlene Li, founder of technology research and advisory firm Altimeter Group, saw Google's actions as a misguided response to a real threat from a competitor in its core search business. 'Google isn't used to having competition. You look at this incident and you wonder why they are doing this. It feels amateurish in a way, a kind of 'they're not playing fair' attitude,' she said."
They don't have to copy an algorithm if they are just copying search results. This response is amateur.
I do a lot of internet marketing, about 12 months ago, for around a week, I kept finding bing results in the google search results for various queries, they would be stupid Not to check out the competitions results and quality level. if you do a site:bing.com search, you'll still find some bing results in the google listings, but no where near as much as they where a year ago.
I don't see this phrase going down well in any other industry. If you copy a map or a book or the design for a car from a different company in the same field, you wouldn't get out of it by calling it "competitive research". Microsoft doesn't need to reverse engineer google's algorithm if they can just steal their results directly; in fact, it's simpler this way because it cuts out the middle part where they even bother to figure out how it works.
who is paying these so called "search industry analysts and execs".
he who controls the spice controls the universe
google sting operation
It worked, though. It diverted attention from Microsoft's accusation that Google profits from search spam.
If its just the click result for some weird search words then I would say Microsoft was being very clever.
If Microsoft is exclusively using Google's click-through data for the all the popular search words then Microsoft is cheating.
That poor little upstart is struggling with all that competition that google does not have
Who needs to reverse engineer the Google's search algorithm when you can simply copy the results? Read the Google accusation again and it didn't even mention anything related to reverse engineering. Why is the "industry" always so silly?
I read the article and it just seemed like a bunch of collated sound bites with all the intelligence of a 14 year old who thinks she wins arguments by being the first to call the other a hater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
They seem to be dancing around the core charge of copying what were nonsensical search results that, if not copied from Google, should not have returned any results. They also seem to be attempting to misdirect in talking about "copying Google's algorithm", when I believe the charge is specifically about copying search results.
I did note that the "Altimeter Group" has only been around a couple years - and has a very website that is full of vague social media-related buzzwords without indicating what, exactly, is their actual skillset (if anything).
#DeleteChrome
Compare the quote from the linked piece:
Google's charge that Microsoft copied its search results is much ado about nothing, some industry insiders say...
(emphasis mine).
To this one by the Slashdot editor:
"Google's Bing sting, reported in Slashdot just days ago and subsequently denied by Microsoft, is now being called 'silly' and 'petty' by search industry analysts and execs
To a seasoned tech reader like me, these two statements mean different things. I can get industry analysts who can support Google's position. Time will tell. Surely Slashdot can do better.
Hey it's not like Microsoft is a client of the "Altimeter Group" and Google is not.
http://www.altimetergroup.com/disclosure
Oh? It's exactly like that?
Look. Nobody thinks that Microsoft is "trying to reverse engineer their algorithm" from search results, but what they are apparently doing is harvesting user data from clicks. It appears that when a user searches from something, and clicks a link as a result of that search, the search term and site that the user found relevant is collected and used in their own search algorithm -- so they are, to some degree, piggybacking on Google here.
On the one hand, its good to know what link your user found relevant -- that's important data for your own search engine to have, on the other hand that's really the sort of thing you should be gathering from your own damn search engine. I'm sure that by now, enough people are using Bing that they can get this data on their own. The only thing getting it through the browser instead of through bing allows them to do is gather it from Google users as well, which is essentially allowing them to tune their own algotrithm on the back of Google's.
It's shady to say the least. Perhaps it was created with good intent -- as discovery tool for when users are on websites with internal search engines, but its obviously pulling in a lot more than that. If Microsoft continues to abuse that, they deserve any bad publicity they get as a result.
Although I understand why Charlene Li might find the notion that search results themselves are IP and not merely the mechanics of the engine unsettling, the truth of the matter is: they are! You can't 'harvest' search queries and subsequent results and use them commercially any more than you can link searches in web411 to the corresponding results in the telephone directories! If Microsoft had been simply 'borrowing' listings _without_ associating them directly to the Google queries that had brought them up that would be one thing, but this is a bridge too far, and all I get from Altimeter Group's comments is a bit of a whine that they think it's unfair to be unable to engage in behaviour they themselves might like to engage in -- which is pretty pathetic. Build your own damn search algorithms!
http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279
Since in Google's test the eventual outcome was plain to see for anyone that used the specific keywords they tested around, how is that "competitive research" on the part of Bing?
Competitive research is what Google does - check every now and then on how accurate Bing's results are to what Google is seeing. It doesn't alter what Google users see, it just tells Google how the competition is doing.
Bing's actions seem the opposite of "research" to me, because they are by design not actually examined by anyone at Bing, only by the customers! In the recent unveiling we see Bing acting as a routing engine to feed some Google results back through Bing. That is not research.
I can't imagine anyone calling the act of pointing this out petty - it casts into doubt any result you get on Bing, as far as input being from Bing matching algorithms or Google's. Even if Bing's algorithms are really good, we'll never know - and that's the most unfortunate thing about this whole situation, as it has tainted the work at Bing regardless of how good it actually is.
Thus the whole thing is not petty, it is in fact very sad for a number of undoubtedly quite smart computer scientists that will forever have this cloud overhead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So if what Microsoft is doing is fair at what point does it exactly become unfair? They're currently harvesting Google's search results from users with software installed and settings enabled, and using that as a factor in their page relevance. What if I fore-go the users and setup some machines to automate this and submit search terms automatically for which I would like to borrow results? Is that fair? What if instead of just some search terms, it's an entire library of search terms? Is that fair? What if I just fucking setup a search page that submits queries to Google server side and returns the results sans ads, but with my own ads? Is THAT fair? Guys give me some funding I just had a great idea for a new search engine.
Who is this altimeter group anyway? For me, their disclosure page: gives:
Error 404 - Not Found
According to Wikipedia... A 404 Error means 'the client was able to communicate with the server but the server could not find what was requested'.
It's probably our fault.
Sorry.
Suspicious? Is Hanlon's Razor applicable? Hmmm.
What Microsoft is doing is not copying, it is a competitive research.
Restaurant Analogy:
1.) A customer ask "What's for breakfast"
2.) Google waiter presents the list of items available for breakfast
3.) Customer picked bacon and egg.
4.) Microsoft observed that
5.) Microsoft learns that when a customer is asking for breakfast, there is a chance that he wants bacon and egg.
Obviously, user choice is only one metric applied by Microsoft. On common search terms, the impact of user choices might not be a large factor.
Returning to the analogy, Google sting operation replaced the search term "What's for breakfast?" with "What's for adkfj1k?a3jfkas?" and the result from bacon and egg to "adsf1231#$".
What Google discovered is a way to game Bing's results.
Summary:
google > We made up results, and you had the very same results. You wouldn't have the same results unless you copied.
microsoft > We are not copying because that wouldn't make sense. Google feels blahblah, Google is blahblah
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Microsoft is a client of Altimeter, they are protecting their revenue stream ...
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
(Actor) Steve Jobs: Good artists copy, great artists steal.
from Pirates of Silicon Valley
oh yeah people paid by microsoft have talked. IDG is like the MS journal
... without paying them a share of the ad revenue, as they currently do?
I think you're confused on the point of "attack".
For example, I can post a link to this page. Google can now see the page. Of course, it could get to that page from within shopper.cnet.com, anyway, but the robots.txt file or NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW tags may be warning it off. (So Google has to walk the URL back up to http://shopper.cnet.com/robots.txt, to make sure, and it may not see http://www.shopper.com/robots.txt, by the way.)
More to the point, I can post a link to this page of a search result on shopper.com. Then Google can see that search. And, in an hour or two, it might show up in a google search of "wall wart servers", which would be useless, but anyway.
I can post a link to this query, however, and, not only might Google's spider collect it (from here), but it might not even have to get it from here. I'm probably not the first person to search shopper.com for "Small office home office server".
I can't see there being an ethical issue here, because those links feed people to shopper.com. In fact, cnet likely has some agreements with Google on that. And many such search sites (well, smaller ones) deliberately use Google's search engines to save themselves a bit of infrastructure cost.
Google, on the other hand, may prefer not to put some of those small search sites results on their general search pages, but that's a side issue.
Now, how do you suppose that bing picks up a query like, "m4-7734-6al 63363r"? Unless someone posts that (like I just did), how does bing get that query just from my using it in a Google search a few minutes ago?
To say this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, you'd be accusing google of planting code in Chrome that watches for bing search results and feeds them back to google's search engine optimizer on the sly. (A new way for a browser to call home!) And/or of making deals with the Mozilla team. But the evidence you mention doesn't really support that, as someone else points out.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If I was Google I would Goatse Bing's ass for being so lame.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Google can prevent Bing from scraping their data if they want to. Instead they allow it so they can "sting" them. Ridiculous.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
I think this article says everything that needs to be said on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279
Essentially Bing's defense (as outlined in the article) goes like this:
Bulllshit like this is how databases, and other mere collections of information, will become copyrightable. Whoever wins, we'll lose.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
You be the judge..just a warning using the links included in this AC post will most likely make you go blind.
The first is from a string to bing that reads microsoft copies googles search results
this next one is from the string through google that is google copies microsofts bing search results
As any good analytical mind will see the results are really twisted the first one tries to sell me a copy of windows seven I guess because bing recognised that I was asking bing to search for something about google with firefox on a linux based OS.
the second one to google twisted my question around and corrected what I searched for to tell me that the only search results possible in this case were that Microsoft was copying their search results. Sounds like I should I should investigate more....oh shit who turned out the lights it is getting dark in here....help
Leopards, spots. Kettle, black. m$, evil. You want real silliness, check out their patent for the not operator they invented. How on earth the world of software got by without this stunning breakthrough is a real mystery.
Exam and search results are quite different. The purpose of the former is test if the student understood his lessons or not, while for the latter is simply to deliver. If the student copies his neighbour's result, it defeats the purpose of the exam. This is cheating. The goal of search, are simply, to deliver the results the user is most likely asking for. Observing how users use a competitor's product to improve your own is not cheating. It is competition.
Sam Walton did it to improve his stores (early days of Walmart). I would bet even Larry and Sergey used yahoo/altavista/etc search engines and observed what they are doing right and what are they doing wrong. This is the norm in business. That's probably only low level employees at Google are releasing these - Larry/Sergey/Schmidt/Marrisa knew better.
Google's actions as a misguided response to a real threat from a competitor in its core search business.
If a 'real threat' to Google's search business has to use Google to improve their results, I don't think Google will have anything to worry about from a competitor that will always be a few steps behind.
Because it clearly outs analysts who get their marching orders from Redmond.
In my opinion, Bing has blatantly copied Googles results. This cannot be disputed surely. How else would bing come up with the same page for the fake search term used. They just spouting off all kinds of crap to blur and confuse things as much as possible, as a form of defense.
The thing is this is bad because they are clearly struggling with their search algorithms. They have motivaton to copy. Google on the other hand is vastly superior in terms of results, it doesn't make sense that they would do this out of paranoia of a competitor. This would have been a individual at Google came up with this sting idea and everyone would have been caught off guard by what he found.
As an example of Bings problems: Search for "ie9" on Google, then try it on bing. See the difference?
"'We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop."
Of course if you don't actually have a search engine, as appears to be the case with Microsoft, then Google isn't a competitor.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
It would be very hard to explain it English but, the broken/robot like turkish of Windows versions is legendary. Even Steve Balmer when visited Turkey got surprised when he heard it "first time" from reporters.
Considering English version of Windows sells at least 30% more expensive and still being bought by IT professionals and businessmen, you can imagine the degree of broken Turkish.
As I don't really like anything number 1, especially a one with very questionable/spam results in Turkish, I decided to give a try to Bing Mobile on my Nokia/Symbian handset. It took 5 secs for me to give it up and post feedback to MS. The reason? I saw the EXACT, made up Turkish in a single line on 320x240 mobile screen. The rest was? Logo! So they spent billions of dollars, risked their "get along" with Google, I am betting there are way more than 1000 Turks working at that company who absolutely knows the horrible Turkish of Windows and they end up with the very same language (can't claim it is turkish) on their latest project, Bing.
Copying Google? Oh well, I didn't need proof. When Bing was first launched, it was clean. I didn't get virus/trojan/spyware infested sites as results when I look for a software title. I said "Just the Windows and support searches may keep it afloat" jokingly. Recently did a search again, download3k and various known suspects with "red" ratings from any sane search security product (e.g. mcafee) started to appear. The results were the very reason I gave up Google for search on any not so secured computer/device. So, lets say, what left? Yahoo search gone too, ask.com? I started to use dmoz directory more&more, the problem is, it is not 1997 anymore.
Turkish Windows not being fixed can be explained by millions of pages of documents needing to be updated with training/manuals and even their exams. So lets say the disaster already happened without any kind of possible fix. What is the issue with SEARCH service which started months ago?
BTW, for Grammar guys on Slashdot or MS supporters: English is not my native language and I didn't charge $140 to write this message so, don't waste your time.
like so: "All nonsensical results powered by Google" (based on the evidence Google has shown so far)
Google's actions as a misguided response to a real threat from a competitor in its core search business.
If a 'real threat' to Google's search business has to use Google to improve their results, I don't think Google will have anything to worry about from a competitor that will always be a few steps behind.
For years, I have chosen Yahoo just because it is less popular, SEO idiots doesn't care, I got an account from 1998 so they already spied the hell out of me and they had these tiny inventions like integrating MCafee sitechecker to results.
Now, it is just another interface to Bing with horrible spam results (just like Google!) and Mcafee started to disappear sometimes. Perhaps their "partner" doesn't like the fact that anything regarding windows software download may and will have "red" results.
So thanks to super elite Google fans and Tech media/clueless business guys, we lost the only real alternative to Google search.
What does that make Slashdot?
Slashdot is the messenger who is repeatedly getting shot by people who claims to have larger IQ than Joe Public.
C+P the subject line into google and see what pops up. In a few days, bing will show you the same thing.
For people who choose Bing, the reason is likely they are fed up with SEO which became like a cancer or some kind of human powered worm and the stance of Google against user privacy.
If they copy Google that way and openly admit they already "spy" (OK OK, anonymous data) users who trusted them by installing the needless toolbar, what is left as a reason? It is clearly not Microsoft since they know their image and childishly take measures to hide their brand from Bing.
I fully expect this comment to be buried, but am I the only one to have noticed that around 50% of Slashdot comments for stories concerning Microsoft seem to end up smelling of astroturf?
I'd say it's quite defiantly a fair use breach.
the URLs are just data / facts but the presentation is copyrighted and that's a very small amount of compact data when it comes to search results.
Now goggle may cache some things when people ask their pages to be indexed and it can be disabled with a robots.txt, they've had some flak with regards to fair use.
But what Bing/Microsoft are doing it copy large chunks of lots of quite specific peoples (in terms of user usage) presentation of facts, not just the odd quote here and there, but whole chapters, especially with regard to some very unique and personal, custom data transformation presentations such as spelling mistakes / corrections.
It's a bit like me selling a dictionary as my own when I've copied a-f from one, f-r from another and r-z from a third and claiming it's ok as I copied it by taking lots of snapshots of word definitions from people all over the world reading it in their web browser.
Because one word definition is fair use and well each user consented via some weird 'agreement' that let the software automatically spy on them if they didn't know to switch it of (e.g. they hadn't read the so called agreement)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Some of the accusations from Google may be true.
About 2 years ago I spoke to a friend that works at Microsoft. He told me that internally, they use a special search page. In this page, every employee types his or her query and is presented with the results from both Bing and Google in one overview. Microsoft employees are expected to report it if they find that the Google results are better. The search results would then be 'corrected' by the Bing team. From this I conclude that a concerted effort to copy the Google algorithms was already underway at that time.
It would not be so far fetched to assume that they have somehow automated this process in the meantime. I think Google's claims hold merit when seen in this light...
Just my 5 cents...
No they didn't crawl Wikipedia because it was the MISSPELLING that Google planted, and that was not on Wikipedia.
They literally DID copy Google's search results verbatim based on the data they captured from their users surfing. And Bings are not different where they've done the copying.
They also DID copy what the user searches for, took it straight off the edit fields on the web page. Their EULA gives them permission to sniff the edit fields on web pages you visit. It gives permission for Microsoft to grab everything from credit card data, medical data, addresses, bank accounts, password, .... who knows what Microsoft is grabbing, that EULA gives them permission to do anything.
Depending on the legality of their EULA, there are serious criminal law implications on the data they grab there. This kind of ducking and dodging won't fix that.
... you attack the accuser.
Standard FUD.
You do not need the algorithm. To copy the answer off the another paper. You just send a URL to Google and reformat the results in your handwriting.
Now the Professor has called you out and you fail.
If nothing else it is about the principle of the thing.It may be acceptable in business to do such a thing but we all know that morally it is not ok.Shame on Microsoft for this.Who would want to do business with such an organization.Do they not have any pride or dignity?
"Google's Bing sting, reported in Slashdot just days ago and subsequently denied by Microsoft, is now being called 'silly' and 'petty' by search industry analysts and execs. The reason: it would be impossible for Microsoft to use the copied results to reverse engineer Google's search algorithms"
Except Google never accused them of reverse engineering Google's search algorithms. What was proved was that the Bing Toolbar scooped-up the endusers Google searches and feed them to Bing. Who exactly are these 'industry analysts and execs', and what are their affiliations in the tech industry.
Bing is scraping the data right out of the individual users' browsers. They aren't getting it directly from Google (where Google could easily stop it).
So, if I had a large farm of computers available, and were a fierce competitor of bing, i could sabotage bing by programming these clients to run searches and send back nonsensical hits for real valid searches. Perhaps, I'd stay away from searches on medical terms, but maybe a search like: popular hotels in washington DC. Seems like microsoft's search system has a vulnerability that can easily be gamed against itself.
Hope Google increase the weight of "Altimeter Group" and its "analysts" for search terms like "Microsoft Shill" "Microsoft Fuddies" "Microsoft Astro Turfers". That way we would be able to get a good idea of all these pimps used by Microsoft for its damage control PR.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Google Entry
The Bing Entry
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I found it amusing when Microsoft was outed for copying search results. I have to admit that I did not fully read the articles. I think Microsoft's copying could be a big deal if the links returned from a search are a verbatim copy of Google's search results. Couldn't this be considered plagiarism? I doubt this is what is happening, but I could hear a lawyer arguing the case.
I think Google could have a bit of fun with this through advertising. Imagine a person searching Bing at home and a Microsoft employee sitting in an office. The person searches Bing and the Microsoft employee uses Google to complete the search and then 'pastes' the results into a Bing webpage that the person at home views. Or, show a laptop with a Bing paper border taped to the screen and google results showing through in the middle.
If they were using the data to create a Satnav product, yes. Otherwise, no. There's a pretty obvious difference between having a correlation between your data and someone else's data, and having an exact duplicate of a direct competitor's data in your competing product.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Everyone needs to read this link. The PR dance is getting ridiculous, but this story is also making /. demographic's disappointingly irrational side show through. Seriously, both companies are trying to play with public opinion; the whole thing is consistently being mis-characterized to elicit reaction.
At least try to read about the facts
Basically Microsoft's defense is now: "We're copying every search engine, not just google."
It really doesn't justify anything.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
"Search industry analysts and execs" saying that you need to 'reverse engineer' a search result to COPY a RESULT. despite, when it is requested, result stays there in front of you in all its glory in the first place ...
....
no wonder they are nowhere near google in competition.
OR, maybe they are doing similar things, and just preparing the grounds for getting discovered, just in case
Read radical news here
/. = the voice of reason. Thanks for reasonable replies to that topic. It seams like all other news/blogs I'm reading are deep in Microsoft's pocket, favoring crazy point of view that Bing/Microsmurf did nothing wrong.
how do you respond to a hotlinker? one was it to change the image. splatter bing full of goatse and they'll stop.
I won't believe it until each analyst can prove s/he is not under Microsoft's influence.
The search results Microsoft was after are typo-corrected search results. Google went to a lot of trouble to second-guess people's spelling errors and still provide the right search. Microsoft was just stealing the correctional information, not trying to reverse-engineer their algorithms.
The ridiculous key words you can find in Wikipedia and else where on the net now are only there because of the sting. It happened. Microsoft has egg on its face and is now calling in the name-callers to tarnish the whole operation because they got their pants pulled down in public.
Buncha sore losers, if you ask me. What happened to providing a better product? Oh, now I remember -- Microsoft smothered everyone making a better product.
It looks like Microsoft has paid some people to speak on their behalf. If Bing wants to compete they will need the software, infrastructure, and people to do so.
“We’re not copying but watching users,” Shum said.
Weitz added, “The word ‘copy’ has a very specific connotation, and it’s wrong. We get the clickstream. We’re going to see it. We may choose to show it or not.”
Oh, ok, that changes everything!
Teacher, I wasnt copying Billy's test, i was watching his scribestream. See, fancy words make it hip, and cool, and legit!
What this really is, is an attempt by Google to draw the medias and their consumers attention to Microsoft and their data mining. Data mining which Google cannot do anymore by themselfs, since the former said medias attention prevented them from doing so any longer. For a reminder : http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/google-chrome-privacy-worse-than-you-think/
Bing's algorithm is simply better.
1) it only indexes Google's results IF the user clicks on it. The Bing toolbar could do this for *any* website. Say I go to reddit.com and then click a link, and follow another link. Bing may use that as a measure of some association. In this instance, it is indexing a search term to the HUMAN SELECTED return. There are many times that when you search for something, Google's first few pages are crap, because you are looking for something more specific or local to you. If you eventually find the link, Bing may be able to take the search term + selected link + other things they know about the user to index better over all results.
2) as already said, Bing's algorithm factors in hundreds to thousands of other things. For a given set of completely random characters there may be no association in there index (I'd hope so in fact). However, after a user searches for that random set of characters AND clicks a link, now there IS an association. If Bing through whatever other resources it has decides it's valuable to index, then of course if you search on that term, and it's the ONLY hit in the database, it's going to mimic Google's algorithm.
The most transparent line of FUD was the Hotchkiss line at the end, minimizing MS's actions as "like Ford trying to win the automotive wars by copying a 1998 Honda," because Google's PageRank algorithm was originally developed over 10 years ago. Huh? Was Bing copying results from 10 years ago, or from the present?
I think that the wikipedia definition pretty much says it. If Bing had put their purloined searches up as "Google top result", with a convenient link back to the Google page they scraped the result from -- then there'd be not be much to snark about. The problem with what they've done is they make it look as if they've independently come to the same conclusion as Google -- and, by implication, that the rest of 'their' results are equally relevant).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
What Microsoft is claiming that they're doing here, however is having IE phone home with what a user is doing on a completely unaffiliated page. This, then, raises the question of where else are they tracking what I'm doing? Are they tracking what stories I'm reading on slashdot? are they telling the CIA/MOSAD/KGB when I use a proxy to read Al Jezera? This raises a huge slew of privacy questions about what parts of my browsing history are being tracked in one central place, if I were to use IE as my browser.
Even secure links and proxies become irrelevant if the surveillance is being done from within the browser.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I don't really understand why Google immediately went public with the information. They could have taken note of where Microsoft's searches were coming from and fed utterly crazy results to those requests. To the extent that Bing relies on Google's results, Bing would be discredited if--for example--it returned results about Amish porn to a query about where to buy a Ford Flex.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I wonder if it's possible to game the bing engine by searching for common terms and then clicking on weird results. Maybe get a large number of basement dwelling nerds (cough cough - 4chan) to all work together. Might be able to even use javascript to add links to different sites (cough cough 4chan), then all searches could lead to that one website. Just a thought.
"Google isn't used to having competition."
Google has competition? In search? From whom?
No, really.
Execs typically don't know that much about their technology, so their take on this matter is most likely irrelevant.
"Analysts" is a weaselly euphemism for "whomever we feel like citing."
Just a note on consumer consent to allow Bing toolbar to mine data ... it may be in the EULA, but in my experience (repair tech who helps regular people) most people don't know how they got a Bing Bar in the first place - it usually rides in piggy-back with Java, Open Office or any other bit of software that wants to earn a buck pushing crappy toolbars.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!