My other choice is DSL through Frontier. The first thing Frontier did after taking over Verizon's landlines was stop the FIOS rollout, so their speed is 3 mbits and will be for the foreseeable future. (The exact same speed it has been since 1998...) Clear's closing down shop, at least direct to residential customers, and they couldn't even hit the 3 mbits where I am anyway.
Knowing how bad my ISP service is would just be rubbing in how awful the lack of competition is.
It drives me nuts that every reply to every new product idea assumes: 1) The product is seriously being worked on 2) The product will be released to the public, and soon, and 3) They'll be forced to use the product, as if some thug was holding a gun to their head
In this case, Microsoft's not even likely at step 1, much less step 3. Frickin' relax, ok?
and if someone doesn't believe that, check some documentaries about the tetris guy and tetris - trolling for status and money whilst producing nothing of interest for the past 25 years(the docs paint a rosier picture of his accomplishments, but if you watch them you can decide for yourself).
What are you talking about? Microsoft hired him to make Hexic HD for the XBox 360 launch, just a few years ago.
I think the bigger problem is voters voting for an office based on powers that office doesn't have. I mean, one person on this thread explicitly voted for Obama so he would close Gitmo, ignoring the fact that it's neither his job, or even in his power, to do so.
BoingBoing does the same thing with Creative Commons photos all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it. I guess it's because it's "open source friendly" and Elsevier isn't?
Secondly, 2) if you knew that was such a fucking weak piece of evidence, why didn't you explain it in your original post, thereby diverting everybody who instantly thinks "wow this guy is wrong" reading it? So you're wrong and dumb.
Are cars getting cheaper because labor costs have dropped? No, they aren't.
What the...
Did it occur to you to actually check that before typing it? Cars only look expensive if you fail to account for cost-of-living and inflation-- they're cheaper now than ever before.
The ONLY WAY to declare setting up a call center in India unethical is to simultaneously to declare that the average Indian's well-being is worth less than the average American's.
Needless to say, nothing in this thread could possibly convince me of that.
How would Bing's geniuses be able to write a spider that would be able to associate the artificial search term with the web page?
If you bothered to actually read my original post, you'd see I already covered that.
It was due to Google's association that they indirectly copied.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about what the word "copy" means in this context. I don't see Bing adding the term to their database because it sees 20 people searching for it as "copying". Others, apparently, do.
Sorry, I'm not going to reply to your whole post, because it's long and I don't have the time. But I will reply to this:
That's actually how the whole story started. Or perhaps, we could say search term like the misspelled "hmabruger". (The initial article speaks about misspelling "tarsorrhaphy").
It's possible, *possible*, that Google has an actual case about Bing stealing spelling corrections, but: 1) Their example "tarsorrhaphy" isn't relevant because Wikipedia has a redirect on that spelling-- Bing probably simply got the page due to the Wikipedia redirect, without even realizing the spelling was incorrect. (Which matches what the Google engineer saw.)
2) The sting operation doesn't say anything about Bing stealing spelling correcting data. All it proves is that Bing associates searched terms with clicked links, one of the thousands of indicators it uses to determine when to index a term, and something pretty much everybody (at least in the industry) knew it did already.
So while Google may have a point, they're certainly not providing enough evidence to verify it.
Bing's not taking anything derived from PageRank. A site (in this case Google, but it could be ANY domain) says "word A links to URL B", and that's all the data Bing has.
You can easily prove Bing isn't "stealing" Google's results. Just search for anything more common than the nonsense words Google used to test this. Like I said above, if Google could prove Bing's results for the word "hamburger" were stolen, *then* they'd have something. Right now, they got nothing.
I disgree. I think it shows that Bing engineers have come up with a way of indexing domain-specific searches that Google engineers either hadn't thought up, or hadn't implemented for some reason.
In the past year, Google hasn't done anything (search-wise) but rip-off Bing. That's not to say that Bing is necessarily better, but it does show that Google thinks they're doing some things right. Competition is a good thing.
But I'm the kind of guy who likes to cheer on underdogs, so keep that in mind.
You are saying the the Bing toolbar sucessfully recognizes this government search page as a search and realizes which field is the search term?
Doesn't really have to... all it needs is "this text entered into a field leads to this link being clicked."
And recognized which click the user did subsequently as the actual link to the searched item, rather than ads, next page, new search, etc?
Not 100% sure on this one. Either they have a pretty good heuristic preventing "Next" button clicks from becoming search results, or a human looks at this stuff at some point.
And their AI was designed to figure this out without somebody at Bing ever looking at this page?
It's possible. But you're also making an assumption.
I'm guessing at how the process works, remember-- Bing hasn't outlined exactly what they're doing. Including telling us whether people are involved in the process or not. I don't know where you got this "insider information" that it's all automatic, but I'm guessing it was retrieved from your ass.
And those writers did not design this algorithm to specifically recognize Google's search pages?
As I said in my first response, nothing in this algorithm requires a specific domain. They could have blacklisted Google's domain (and actually might after this incident), but that doesn't mean they were going out-of-their-way to "copy" Google results.
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
Gee, maybe they indexed it when the destination page *did* contain the text? Did that ever occur to you?
Let's say you visit a government information website, which has its own search engine completely disconnected with Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. No data sharing at all, but the website is publicly available.
You put in a search term trying to find an application for a Foobar. (You search "foobar application", then click the resulting link "apply for a foobar".)
The Bing toolbar looks at the action you just took, and enters it into its database. When a certain number of people (say, 20, the number Google used) do the same search and click the same result, Bing thinks to itself, "well, this search and resulting link is pretty popular-- I should add that to my index."
Now in the future, the public can search the Foobar website to find the application directly from their browser's toolbar, instead of having to go to the Foobar website first. Bing's more useful to users, and Foobar's website is more useful to users.
Do you believe what Bing is doing in this scenario wrong?
"adding a term/URL to our database" is not the same thing as "copying another search engine's results".
1) and 2) in your list are not mutually-exclusive, and are both simultaneously true.
Google's evidence isn't enough to support the "copying our results" conclusion. If they had done the experiment on the word "hamburger", then they could have convinced me.
(Oh, and their spelling correction example is invalid because that redirect is in Wikipedia... almost certainly both Google and Bing correct that spelling based on Wikipedia's redirect.)
Their example misspelling "Torsoraphy" is a complete non-issue, since Wikipedia has a redirect on that term to the correct spelling. Google did themselves a disservice by including that in the article, because it's just as (in fact, more) likely Bing is correcting the spelling based on Wikipedia's redirect than that it's copying Google's spelling correction database. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who was calling "BS" when the article mentioned that term.)
And sadly, that's the only example Google presented that's an actual realistic search term and not a gibberish term. The gibberish terms only prove that Bing is using data from the toolbar to popular their engine (duh!) They don't prove Bing is copying Google's indexing.
This whole thing is a tempest in a teacup. Google might not be happy that Bing's toolbar is being used to gather terms, but they certainly can't say with any certainty that Bing is "copying their results".
They're not *copying* the result. They're *adding* that particular term->URL combination to their database.
This *only* worked because Google chose terms that nobody had ever searched before: "fdsfhasjhdajhhj". So when you do a Bing search for "fdsfhasjhdajhhj" it showed the same results because that's the *only* data Bing had in their index for the term "fdsfhasjhdajhhj".
Ok, Google, you found a way to (excuse the terminology) Google-bomb Bing using a nonsense word. Now if you can show this technique works with a search term like, say, "hamburger"-- THEN you'll have an accusation.
If you think what Bing's doing is copying, then you have to expand the "copying" definition to a ridiculous degree... when Google looks at what sites my blog links to to determine PageRank, it's "copying" my blog.
It's driving me nuts that a bunch of supposedly technical people are turning their brains off and not bothering to think about this at all. Adding a term to a search engine's database is not "copying" by any reasonable definition of the word. Whether Bing's toolbar should be doing this is a completely different debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the Verizon and Frontier line include both DSL and FIOS? Because that makes the data for those two providers pretty damned useless.
And then what?
My other choice is DSL through Frontier. The first thing Frontier did after taking over Verizon's landlines was stop the FIOS rollout, so their speed is 3 mbits and will be for the foreseeable future. (The exact same speed it has been since 1998...) Clear's closing down shop, at least direct to residential customers, and they couldn't even hit the 3 mbits where I am anyway.
Knowing how bad my ISP service is would just be rubbing in how awful the lack of competition is.
Did that ever occur?
It drives me nuts that every reply to every new product idea assumes:
1) The product is seriously being worked on
2) The product will be released to the public, and soon, and
3) They'll be forced to use the product, as if some thug was holding a gun to their head
In this case, Microsoft's not even likely at step 1, much less step 3. Frickin' relax, ok?
and if someone doesn't believe that, check some documentaries about the tetris guy and tetris - trolling for status and money whilst producing nothing of interest for the past 25 years(the docs paint a rosier picture of his accomplishments, but if you watch them you can decide for yourself) .
What are you talking about? Microsoft hired him to make Hexic HD for the XBox 360 launch, just a few years ago.
Maybe we're just furious that he wasted his talent duplicating someone else's ideas instead of coming up with an original idea of his own?
There's plenty to object to here, regardless of how you feel about copyright and trademark law.
Way to not answer my question. I guess I'll just file you under 'Slashdot kook" and move on with my life.
What about the quote you chose marks him as a colonialist? Is it not true that the US has interests everywhere?
I think the bigger problem is voters voting for an office based on powers that office doesn't have. I mean, one person on this thread explicitly voted for Obama so he would close Gitmo, ignoring the fact that it's neither his job, or even in his power, to do so.
Yeah but they still do it so...
Wait, people get a free pass for breaking the rules if they helped draft the rules? What kind of crazy topsy-turvy world are we living in?
So by placing a city of your pic on your website header, you somehow call-out BoingBoing on their practice of using CC works on a for-profit site?
Either I'm really fucking confused, or you are. What the holy hell does your response have to do with BoingBoing?
...? Huh? I don't understand what you're trying to say. Do you work for Boingboing?
What the holy fuck are you talking about? Dude, the pot's made you paranoid.
BoingBoing does the same thing with Creative Commons photos all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it. I guess it's because it's "open source friendly" and Elsevier isn't?
Either way, sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Well first of all, 1) you're wrong.
Secondly, 2) if you knew that was such a fucking weak piece of evidence, why didn't you explain it in your original post, thereby diverting everybody who instantly thinks "wow this guy is wrong" reading it? So you're wrong and dumb.
Are cars getting cheaper because labor costs have dropped? No, they aren't.
What the...
Did it occur to you to actually check that before typing it? Cars only look expensive if you fail to account for cost-of-living and inflation-- they're cheaper now than ever before.
The ONLY WAY to declare setting up a call center in India unethical is to simultaneously to declare that the average Indian's well-being is worth less than the average American's.
Needless to say, nothing in this thread could possibly convince me of that.
How would Bing's geniuses be able to write a spider that would be able to associate the artificial search term with the web page?
If you bothered to actually read my original post, you'd see I already covered that.
It was due to Google's association that they indirectly copied.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about what the word "copy" means in this context. I don't see Bing adding the term to their database because it sees 20 people searching for it as "copying". Others, apparently, do.
Sorry, I'm not going to reply to your whole post, because it's long and I don't have the time. But I will reply to this:
That's actually how the whole story started. Or perhaps, we could say search term like the misspelled "hmabruger". (The initial article speaks about misspelling "tarsorrhaphy").
It's possible, *possible*, that Google has an actual case about Bing stealing spelling corrections, but:
1) Their example "tarsorrhaphy" isn't relevant because Wikipedia has a redirect on that spelling-- Bing probably simply got the page due to the Wikipedia redirect, without even realizing the spelling was incorrect. (Which matches what the Google engineer saw.)
2) The sting operation doesn't say anything about Bing stealing spelling correcting data. All it proves is that Bing associates searched terms with clicked links, one of the thousands of indicators it uses to determine when to index a term, and something pretty much everybody (at least in the industry) knew it did already.
So while Google may have a point, they're certainly not providing enough evidence to verify it.
Bing's not taking anything derived from PageRank. A site (in this case Google, but it could be ANY domain) says "word A links to URL B", and that's all the data Bing has.
You can easily prove Bing isn't "stealing" Google's results. Just search for anything more common than the nonsense words Google used to test this. Like I said above, if Google could prove Bing's results for the word "hamburger" were stolen, *then* they'd have something. Right now, they got nothing.
I disgree. I think it shows that Bing engineers have come up with a way of indexing domain-specific searches that Google engineers either hadn't thought up, or hadn't implemented for some reason.
In the past year, Google hasn't done anything (search-wise) but rip-off Bing. That's not to say that Bing is necessarily better, but it does show that Google thinks they're doing some things right. Competition is a good thing.
But I'm the kind of guy who likes to cheer on underdogs, so keep that in mind.
You are saying the the Bing toolbar sucessfully recognizes this government search page as a search and realizes which field is the search term?
Doesn't really have to... all it needs is "this text entered into a field leads to this link being clicked."
And recognized which click the user did subsequently as the actual link to the searched item, rather than ads, next page, new search, etc?
Not 100% sure on this one. Either they have a pretty good heuristic preventing "Next" button clicks from becoming search results, or a human looks at this stuff at some point.
And their AI was designed to figure this out without somebody at Bing ever looking at this page?
It's possible. But you're also making an assumption.
I'm guessing at how the process works, remember-- Bing hasn't outlined exactly what they're doing. Including telling us whether people are involved in the process or not. I don't know where you got this "insider information" that it's all automatic, but I'm guessing it was retrieved from your ass.
And those writers did not design this algorithm to specifically recognize Google's search pages?
As I said in my first response, nothing in this algorithm requires a specific domain. They could have blacklisted Google's domain (and actually might after this incident), but that doesn't mean they were going out-of-their-way to "copy" Google results.
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
Gee, maybe they indexed it when the destination page *did* contain the text? Did that ever occur to you?
Let me ask you this:
Let's say you visit a government information website, which has its own search engine completely disconnected with Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. No data sharing at all, but the website is publicly available.
You put in a search term trying to find an application for a Foobar. (You search "foobar application", then click the resulting link "apply for a foobar".)
The Bing toolbar looks at the action you just took, and enters it into its database. When a certain number of people (say, 20, the number Google used) do the same search and click the same result, Bing thinks to itself, "well, this search and resulting link is pretty popular-- I should add that to my index."
Now in the future, the public can search the Foobar website to find the application directly from their browser's toolbar, instead of having to go to the Foobar website first. Bing's more useful to users, and Foobar's website is more useful to users.
Do you believe what Bing is doing in this scenario wrong?
"adding a term/URL to our database" is not the same thing as "copying another search engine's results".
1) and 2) in your list are not mutually-exclusive, and are both simultaneously true.
Google's evidence isn't enough to support the "copying our results" conclusion. If they had done the experiment on the word "hamburger", then they could have convinced me.
(Oh, and their spelling correction example is invalid because that redirect is in Wikipedia... almost certainly both Google and Bing correct that spelling based on Wikipedia's redirect.)
Their example misspelling "Torsoraphy" is a complete non-issue, since Wikipedia has a redirect on that term to the correct spelling. Google did themselves a disservice by including that in the article, because it's just as (in fact, more) likely Bing is correcting the spelling based on Wikipedia's redirect than that it's copying Google's spelling correction database. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who was calling "BS" when the article mentioned that term.)
And sadly, that's the only example Google presented that's an actual realistic search term and not a gibberish term. The gibberish terms only prove that Bing is using data from the toolbar to popular their engine (duh!) They don't prove Bing is copying Google's indexing.
This whole thing is a tempest in a teacup. Google might not be happy that Bing's toolbar is being used to gather terms, but they certainly can't say with any certainty that Bing is "copying their results".
They're not *copying* the result. They're *adding* that particular term->URL combination to their database.
This *only* worked because Google chose terms that nobody had ever searched before: "fdsfhasjhdajhhj". So when you do a Bing search for "fdsfhasjhdajhhj" it showed the same results because that's the *only* data Bing had in their index for the term "fdsfhasjhdajhhj".
Ok, Google, you found a way to (excuse the terminology) Google-bomb Bing using a nonsense word. Now if you can show this technique works with a search term like, say, "hamburger"-- THEN you'll have an accusation.
If you think what Bing's doing is copying, then you have to expand the "copying" definition to a ridiculous degree... when Google looks at what sites my blog links to to determine PageRank, it's "copying" my blog.
It's driving me nuts that a bunch of supposedly technical people are turning their brains off and not bothering to think about this at all. Adding a term to a search engine's database is not "copying" by any reasonable definition of the word. Whether Bing's toolbar should be doing this is a completely different debate.