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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."
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.
What's worse is that Microsoft is a client of Altimeter Group:
http://www.altimetergroup.com/disclosure
Sorry Slashdot, maybe before pushing a story to front page you do a bit of research. The story was submitted by IDG (itwbennett), one of the biggest Microsoft shills on the net. This is all getting out of hand, Microsoft is in damage control and just pushing this FUD about to ensure that faithful Bingsheep keep thinking it's "the best search provider".
Sorry to reply to myself, but I just checked out Charlene's Twitter feed.
http://twitter.com/#!/charleneli
Can we say Microsoft shill?
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: