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 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.
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.
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."
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?