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."
It worked, though. It diverted attention from Microsoft's accusation that Google profits from search spam.
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
A pure marketing lead response is 100% right. The funniest thing was that the attempt to claim click fraud. If we remember click fraud is where a site owner tries to get advertising revenue by making fraudulent clicks. I don't see how Google manages to get advertising revenue from Bing. This just seems to be a case of when you get caught start slinging as much mud around randomly as you can and hope people don't notice.
In case people haven't noticed; what Google has discovered means that if you have private information leaked somewhere (e.g. a password in an SQL query) this means that bing is now pushing that straight from your browser (where it should normally be safe) onto the web. I'm surprised nobody has managed to find a bunch of interesting secret information in bing based on this. There must be some way to get it out. A good chance would be looking for unique keys in URLs or web pages and then feeding them into Bing.
This just looks so obviously terribly wrong that you can see that Microsoft really doesn't have a clue about search. No wonder they have to copy.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
On a related note, what's with all the Google-bashing recently?
I've seen some of it followed up on Grocklaw. As usual, it seems to trace back to Microsoft astro-turfers and lobby groups of various kinds. Microsoft seems to be pushing for some anti-Google anti-trust lawsuits, probably as a pre-emptive move to make any Google anti-trust moves more difficult during the various anti-patent lawsuits.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();