Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-we-do-not-copy-googles-results/8557

by mjfern • 15 years ago

111 74 15 years ago

zdnet.com

snorkel• 15 years ago

"... we embrace and extend them."

bhavin• 15 years ago

I guess that's best possible defense for them at the moment.

"We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"

gst3• 15 years ago

> "We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"

What's the difference to what Google does by e.g. using newspaper articles in a "creative" way (by not only showing them in the search results, but by combining them to a new type of newspaper at news.google.com)?

Joakal• 15 years ago

Bing attempts to heavily monetise their ventures. So basically they're taking away potential eyeballs. And Google did run into a similar issue with news.google.com: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRqFRzuaE...

terryjsmith2• 15 years ago

Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.

gst3• 15 years ago

How do you know that they target search sites? This could also be a more generic approach: If there's a link from page A to page B also return page B if someone searches for page A's keywords and there are only few results.

jameskilton• 15 years ago

Have you read the original claim? Google did a test with completely nonsense words and 100% unrelated search results with those terms. The results showed up on Bing. Whatever Bing is doing, it is using Google's search data.

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

terryjsmith2• 15 years ago

Sure, the question is how you differentiate those actions. Some one typed in [x] and then clicked [y] could certainly be generic, but that would be a massive amount of data to crunch and would require a significant amount of congruency to be enough to modify the Bing algorithm.

How would it differentiate between a form submission and a search? And if it's not and still sending all of that data back to MS, that's far more disconcerting than them just watching me on Google.

It's certainly more believable that the sites were either targeted or were extracted from massive amounts of data for this purpose.

roc2• 15 years ago

Don't Chrome and the Google Toolbar also track clickstream data to refine search results? I assumed that's what they were asking my permission to phone home with, to 'improve their services'.

Do they gentlemanly ignore clickstreams on competitor web sites?

lallysingh• 15 years ago

There's what you clicked on, and there's what you typed into a search box, hit enter, and then clicked on. The two are quite different.

yatsyk• 15 years ago

MS caught on:

- optimization for SunSpider [1]

- now scrapping google SERP

Curious what is next? Linux code is in Win7?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913102

tristanperry• 15 years ago

"We do not copy Google's results."

Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown.

This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. But that's not what today's news is about.

A very weak 'reply' from Microsoft which again seems to pretty much confirm that they ARE 'looking at' certain Google results.

contextfree5• 15 years ago

It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's". The nuances you detail are buried halfway through Danny Sullivan's article and are not reflected in his takeaway in the conclusion.

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

> It's getting blurbed as "Bing's results are a copy of Google's"

Which is untrue. They are nowhere near as good.

natch• 15 years ago

Microsoft: "Music you buy from us Plays For Sure.(TM)"

(the above is just my interpretation).

Is there a pattern here?

NonMint• 15 years ago

As always, buried under the platform hate and apologists from both sides, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

rbanffy6• 15 years ago

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

shadowfox2• 15 years ago

I know it is fun to categorically dismiss posts with a wikipedia link to some arbitrary fallacy. (Hey. I can do it myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy)

But he does have a fraction of a point.

pg3• 15 years ago

The statements by the Microsoft people remind me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

They don't seem to realize that ordinary consumers don't care about this, and that the people who do care (e.g. investors, potential employees) are smart enough that these evasions just make the problem worse.

kenjackson7• 15 years ago

Why would potential employees take this negatively? This is exactly the type of thing I'd love to work on. Give me opt-in to your web browsing characteristics, and let me optimize your searches. Opt-in is the key.

I'm certainly an odd one here, but I'm more inclined to use the Bing toolbar due to this, although the perf cost is still too high to use any toolbar, IMO.

What would be nice is if the browsers had an open format of your browsing history that you can send to providers of your choice...

contextfree5• 15 years ago

moreover, Clinton's statement was an outright lie, not an evasion. And it didn't seem to hurt his approval ratings. The analogy makes no sense.

pg3• 15 years ago

Because if Bing has to rely on Google Search's solutions to problems it should itself be able to solve, that implies it's inferior technology.

axod3• 15 years ago

Most people want to work in a company that innovates.

This isn't innovation. Any fool can write something that copies data from a competitor.

user243• 15 years ago

I'm quite stunned that Google allowed this story to break.

It's such a bold claim, and with such an obvious explanation - Bing use all kinds of click data, whether from Google or not. Did they really not realise that was what was happening, or did they think "this is a certain PR win". Or do they just not have control of what their people say in public?

It's like if MS had discovered googlebombing and used it to 'show' that Google were 'copying' from webpages, or worse assumed that Google were manipulating search results.

I think Harry was exactly correct to describe this as a new kind of click fraud, and Google's handling of their discovery of it just amazes me.

shadowfox2• 15 years ago

It does look like Google thinks this is a PR win. With their comments in the search engine forum and Matt Cuttis' comments in the original HN thread, it is hard believe that this is a "rogue" faction of some sort.

projectileboy• 15 years ago

I believe Ben Bradlee would call that a "non-denial denial".

jranck• 15 years ago

This remains as relevant as ever...

"Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." -Picasso

earl• 15 years ago

Creating a bullshit opt-out -- that they know damn well virtually no one will ever read -- and then having IE send apparently the entirety of a user's browse behavior to MS is sketchy as all hell. One more reason never to use an MS product.

hristov• 15 years ago

This is a sloppy article. If you are going to quote a Microsoft blog post in part, do link to it. Does anyone have a link to the blog post in question from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President. The quote sounds pretty evasive but I would like to see the whole thing before I judge.

EDIT: I found the post:

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...

Reading the whole thing it seems like he pretty much admitted copying Google's search results through users of the Google toolbar. He calls it "collective intelligence."

giberson• 15 years ago

Pragmatically, the following scenario underlines why this is practice is overall bad for the consumer.

  Company A produces product 1.
  Company B produces product 2 inferior to product 1.
  Consumers use product 1.
  Company B enhances product 2 by actively engaging product 1.
  Some consumers use product 2.
  Company B product 2 rises in market share.
  More consumers user product 2.
  Company A drops product 1 due to lack of profits.
  Product 2 quality deteriorates due to absence of product 1.
  Consumers left with inferior product option.

btig• 15 years ago

"It’s a point of pride to Google that it believes it has the best spelling correction system of any search engine"

Indeed, my 11 year old sister loves typing in silly search terms such as "stroobaray pai" and laughing about the fact that Google actually figured out what she meant :-)

Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

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