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."

Comments

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to copy an algorithm if they are just copying search results. This response is amateur.

Re:Seriously?

[ILuvRamen]

I agree totally. What "research" includes looking for an already searched term on Google and then looking at what results come up...then slapping them into your own live result list for the general public? Bing's cheap algorithm is some search and crawling technology from like 2007 mixed with marketing, marketing, MARKETING! Oh, and flashy features that don't really work. So it's not that shocking that they're ripping off other people's results because their product is pretty hollow to begin with.

Re:Seriously?

[Korin43]

Hey, looking at the test next to mine isn't cheating. It's not like I could reverse-engineer the other students algorithm by looking at his test!

Re:Seriously?

[NeutronCowboy]

No kidding. I'm used to nonsense from "industry analysts", but this takes the cake. It's a complete non-sequitur. This never was a question of reverse-engineering. It's a question of straight-up ripping off results.

On a related note, what's with all the Google-bashing recently? First the idea (which has now turned into a meme) that Google's search result are not the gold standard for search anymore, and now the idea (probably soon to be turned into a meme) that Google can't handle competition and is resorting to FUD?

Yes, Google is no saint, it's not perfect. No shit, Sherlock. But if all I did was read "industry analysts" and various websites, I'd think that Google was about to fall apart, what with search sucking and all other products completely falling flat on their face. There's either a general search for the same story going on (Look Ma! I broke the news of Google sucking first!), or some grade A bullshitting is taking place.

Re:Seriously?

[LBArrettAnderson]

I can't believe the number of clueless comments in this thread. Do you still not know what the original story was about? People who have opted to send information to microsoft used google (and various other search engines) to search for something. The Bing toolbar, or whatever was collecting the information, noted that person X searched for term Y, and eventually ended up at page Z. It makes perfect sense to connect Y and Z, regardless of the search engine used, or even if they asked a friend to point them to a page about the subject. That isn't nearly as blatant as you are all claiming. They aren't searching google to get their search results. They are looking at what people are actually looking for based on their searches and browsing. Certainly not cheating.

Re:Seriously?

[Maestro4k]

They don't have to copy an algorithm if they are just copying search results. This response is amateur.

You can certainly make the case that Google setting up the "sting" operation was "silly", or "petty", but Microsoft's response to the whole thing has been quite enlightening. I think it's Microsoft that's got issues with having a real competitor, and it shows. Google's kinda just rubbing salt into the wounds, which isn't very professional, but MS needs to respond better. Trying to deny it, and at the same time accuse Google of committing "click fraud" to setup the sting (something which has a very specific meaning that's mostly criminal and has not a damn thing to do with Google's "sting" operation) comes across as... desperate at best.

Personally I think the whole thing is silly on both sides, but MS's response has done a lot to wipe out the little bit of trust they'd gained in past years for behaving somewhat better. MS's response, and not the whole "sting", is making me even less likely to use Bing in the future as well. Both of these are outcomes I suspect MS didn't want to cause with their reaction. In a nutshell, Google won this little fight when MS started responding with denials and attempts to make Google look like they'd done criminal stuff.

Re:Seriously?

[imthesponge]

It is cheating, regardless of the roundabout way they try to justify it.

Re:Seriously?

[ThePromenader]

I also agree - Bing is cheating. Never mind Google, they're second-sourcing ~everyone's~ results without giving them credit.

Every search engine has its own search methods and data-parsing algorithms (down to the lowest in-site-search php code), and it is these algorithms that provide the 'top results' that bing toolbar (and/or IE) users are clicking on. Never mind the Bing toolbar user; what if the owner/creator of a search engine doesn't want any data generated by it to be sent to Bing - where does ~he~ opt out of MS' data-sculling program?

Bing's tactics are distasteful for many reasons, but mainly a) because they exploit (toolbar) users to scull data from competitors and b) because Bing uses this data to provide 'top results' that it obviously values above those provided by its own algorithm. This is borderline - if not outright - industrial espionage.

Re:Seriously?

[rtfa-troll]

1) Google manually manipulated their search results - something they claim never to do.

Let's examine what exact harm they did. Google ensured that the search results the manipulated would never be returned to many people. They had the manipulation designed to switch off automatically if this happend. They then had their own search engineers search. So the only people "harmed" by the manipulation were Google engineers who already knew about the test.

Clearly, this is a stupid claim. Why would anyone want to make it? Well, because Microsoft manipulates their own search results, so they want to be able to claim Google does too.

2) They then sent a group of Google engineers home to use Internet Explorer after opting-in and turning on Suggested Sites and started searching for very long tailed terms in Google and clicking on the results they wanted (btw, if 20 friends and I did this for some sites I own to improve its search ranking position, Google would penalize our site for this exact behavior).

Why would you mention "opting-in" without saying what they "opted in" for. The crucial thing here, was that there was no warning that opting in for sending data to Microsoft might lead to that data being used on their search engine. Again, this claim is more interesting in what it shows about Microsoft than Google.

3) Only 7-9% of the longest of long tail queries (gibberish) were showing the same top result on Bing as Google when there was no way Bing should be returning any results. There were other results returned by Bing for some terms outside of the top result that didn't match. Google has no explanation as to why the other 91-93% of honeypot terms didn't produce affirmative results for Bing showing the same result.

So the fact that Google doesn't know the details of the inside of Microsoft's system is their fault now?

What's worse is that there is a very clear and simple explanation for this. Microsoft knows that what it is doing is wrong. The copying is even more blatant than that (e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web). Instead of making a fairer algorithm themselves they have spent effort on cloaking their copying. They only randomly introduce results and only after a random delay from the point where the results are clicked on. This is not designed to improve results by weighing up different factors (remember there aren't any other factors in these particular results). This is simply designed to hide how their search engine works.

4) Bing admits yes, we take user click and search data, harvest it and use it as a ranking factor - 1 of 1000s. (Btw, the Google Toolbar does the same exact thing people).

You people need to wake up already. If you don't see what Google is turning into, I'm sorry you're a lost cause. I can't even begin to believe that people are arguing that after you opt-in, run a coordinated SERP clicking operation, manually change your search results after you say you never have done so and have many products that do similar information harvesting that you're so blind to see the other side of this.

I've already addressed above that Google harmed only their own engineers search results. Trying to equate that to deliberate manipulation of search results for money with the aim of defrauding consumers (as in a SERP clicing operation) shows serious dishonesty.

As far as Google turning into something, Google has always been about taking personal data (your searches) and using that to provide you with advertising. Until now I really have had a serious anti-Google bias. But now I begin to see that then are just normal humans/companies like the rest of us at threat of a world dominated by Microsoft. What before looked terrible (using the contents of people's mails to choose which advert

Re:Seriously?

[uglyduckling]

I'm beginning think this debacle is a load of nonsense, having read a few posts, it looks like the engineer in everyone has turned off for the week. What's happening is that the Bing search bar monitors everything that a user clicks on, something that the user explicitly agrees to. The "Bing Sting" methodology that Google outlined on their blog involved inserting bogus search results that returned an unlikely match. They then had their engineers deliberately search for these terms in Google and then - wait for it - click on them. So the Bing toolbar analysed those clicks, and because no-one else in the world was clicking on a link with those terms, they went straight to the top of Bing's results.

So, Microsoft aren't data-mining Google, they're data-mining everyone, doing analysis on any user with the Bing toolbar, to find out the crumbtrail that led them to a certain page. This is arguably better than Google's approach, because Microsoft is finding out how users travel between pages, whilst Google is finding out how developers think users should travel between pages (although in this age of micro-blogging and social networking the distinction is less obvious). If anyone should be worried about this, it should be users of the Bing toolbar who don't want their complete browsing history being analyzed by MS. Google complaining about this would be total hypocrisy, considering the millions of websites Google analyses without permission to get their data.

I never thought I would be defending MS, certainly not on Slashdot, but really Google has nothing to complain about here. Even their robots.txt is irrelevant, because it's the users' text input and click that is being recorded, not the Google search results.

Re:Seriously?

[uglyduckling]

How is it "cheating" - who is making the rules? Is it not "cheating" to crawl millions of sites to find out how they link to each other? If not, why not? Bing are not targeting Google (although I'm sure they're aware that Google results would be included in this), they are collecting the path that the user took to every click that they make. Whether you and I think this is creepy or not (and I certainly do), the users of the toolbar opt-in to this, MS tracks what they do, and partially base their search results on this. It's not cheating in any way, it's just a different approach to collecting data to create meaningful search results, and one that is actually quite interesting - seeing what users actually do, rather than analysing the static links between sites.

Re:Seriously?

[uglyduckling]

No, you totally missed the point.

User A types some words into a text box, then clicks on a link that takes it to a different domain. Toolbar B records those words, together with the destination URL of that link that was clicked, and uses those words to slightly bias the results of search engine C.

Toolbar B does this for every website that user A visits with the express permission of user A.

The owners of search engine D get annoyed, because when they deliberately insert completely unique [text string -> URL] mappings to their search engine, and have their engineers click on those links, it shows up in search engine C.

Note that the only reason search engine D were aware of this in the first place is because bizarre mis-spellings of words in their search engine later turned up in search engine C.

So, there is a logical way to connect page 3 with content X - someone at some point entered X into a text box, then clicked on a link that lead to page 3. In this case it was some Google engineers. The issue here is that Google (along with a lot of Slashdot posters) are thinking of the web in a static sense: 'how could X possibly link to page 3??' - Bing stole that data. Microsoft are dynamically looking at what users do, and the text string -> URL -> click interaction is seen as a relationship between a phrase and a page that they want to take into account with their search results.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. I'm used to nonsense from "slashdotters", but this takes the cake. It's a complete non-sequitur. This never was a question of reverse-engineering. It's a question of straight-up Google fail.

On a related note, what's with all the Google-loving recently? First the idea (which has now turned into a meme) that Google's search result are the gold standard for search, and now the fact (probably soon to be turned into a meme) that Google can't handle competition and is resorting to FUD?

Seriously... Microsoft did not copy the results from Google. The good folks at Google used Bing Toolbar and intentionally configured it to submit web surfing habits to Microsoft, and then spammed it with the notion that the random word had a strong correlation with a specific web page.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Google's fake result for that specific word. They could have skipped it completely in their own search engine, and used a completely separate domain and page for the injection. It would've worked exactly the same. Bing cares about the fact that the word repeatedly was associated with specific URL, and since the word wasn't used in conjunction with anything else, it affected the search results.

Look, if you don't know anything about your neighbor, but hundreds of people spontaneously tell you that he is a good electrician, would you consider it plausible that your neighbor is an electrician?

Re:Seriously?

[malkavian]

The problem, of course, being copyright, and claiming work as their own.
Google create a false entry, accessible only through their own site. This is a work that is intended only to determine whether someone is actually stealing their results (i.e. taking those results, and passing them off as MS's own).
By all means, index non-search sites. That's what search engines are for, but you can't possibly convince me that Microsoft didn't know they were looking at Google's search results.
That really is akin to writing a dictionary by seeing what people read, then saying "Well, lots of people read this other dictionary, so I'll just lift entries verbatim from it, and claim they are my own"..
Yes, search engine tweaking is a very fine art.. It's easy to pick up the wrong signal by mistake. if MS had confessed, and said "Ooops, programming/design error in our browser, this is how it happened, and we're now going to remove all search engine sites from our allowed input", weight of opinion may have been behind them more, rather than blithely saying "It's all Google's fault we're ripping them off".
The root of this is that they're building a dictionary by directly reading a competing dictionary. This isn't creating a diverse, resilient ecosystem. It's parasitism.
Everyone screws up, and things always go wrong. That's a fact of life. What isn't a fact is that strange need to point fingers and say "It's everyone else's fault but mine". Especially when it blatantly is your fault.

Re:Seriously?

[horza]

With tweets like "At Microsoft Productivity Council mtg on future of Office" and worse "Ribbon Hero which teaches how to use MSFT Office better. Making work (gasp!) fun", Charlene Li is obviously blatently dishonest in her representation of her position.

"Charlene Li, founder of technology research and advisory firm Altimeter Group" - and as sortius_nod says, now paid shill.

Phillip.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing is just indexing Google. That's what search engines do, right? =)

Re:Seriously?

[nstlgc]

First of all, I don't think Google has a copyright on any of the content they index, do they?

Second, as I understand it, clickstream data points are only a small part of the equation. Notice how Google could only reproduce this by using totally bogus keywords, ensuring that the data they fed to Bing through the toolbar were the only data points being considered for those keywords?

Bing tracks when users search for something, and what sites they visit as a result. I'd almost be offended intellectually if this was not part of their game to provide me with better search results.

Disclaimer: I use Google almost exclusively. Bing can suck it, but this debate is ridiculously biased.

Pot Calling the Kettle Black

[powerspike]

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.

"Competitive Research"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"Competitive Research"

[grantek]

It's not "research" if the leeched data appears on your production site automatically and without review...

Someone is fudging the facts here!

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:Microsoft is responding with misdirection

[martin-boundary]

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.

Uhm, how would that work, exactly?

Let's say you have a search engine toolbar that looks over a user's shoulder to see what webpages they go to. Presumably, the links that leave those web pages carry information on said user's interests (eg if the user reads slashdot, then the links point to things like other people's comments, and also the site which carries TFA, etc). So the text of that page and the links would be automatically connected by the search engine.

Now if a user goes on a webpage that happens to be a google results webpage, then the links on that webpage will be search results. If one user types in a weird query, then the toolbar will think that user likes those kinds of weird queries, and maybe that other people would like those, too.

So when another user now types exactly the same query to prove the "sting", then the search engine will think it has found another user who likes weird queries, no? So it should show the connections it has learned from the previous webpage.

Re:I think this article says everything...

[hellop2]

Are you serious? Clickstream, Surfstream, Searchstream. Fancy words for a keylogger. From your link:

“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.”

It doesn't matter if you call it watching instead of copying. It's still copying. Bing shouldn't be "watching" google's results, or "copying" the user's click behavior. That's like google's trade secrets. An analogy would be an online newspaper who copies articles verbatim from a competitor, and then justifying it by saying, "We didn't copy the article, we just monitored the user's eyestream and discovered this article. But it's ok because we copy everybody's articles."

From your link: "Bing can also examine how people click on its own results that it lists in response to that search." No shit? It's like it's listed as an afterthought. Of course Bing should be paying attention to their own clicks... and not scraping their competitor's data. But instead, they're trying to justify it using PR words, and creating a convoluted argument that they are merely, "showing the surfstream" rather than "creating a reproduction of an original work", i.e. copying.

It would be like a dating site copying a fake profile from a competitor. "We didn't copy that profile, we're just showing the datestream."