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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."
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.
It worked, though. It diverted attention from Microsoft's accusation that Google profits from search spam.
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.
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
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
That WOULD be the effect, if Microsoft were using ONLY this functionality for their search results. But hey guess what, they aren't. They are using a compounded collection of all types of web searches (google, yahoo, amazon, wikipedia, and more) as ONE part of their algorhythm, and even for rare terms, the results aren't a copy/paste of Google, they are still different...
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:
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.
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
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?
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
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).
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