Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half.<p>Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property.<p>Google has spent billions of dollars in manpower and physical capacity in order to be able to do that. Also, each and every one of those sites can <i>very</i> easily say "don't index me" with a simple robot.txt file on their site. Some do, most don't, because most sites find it valuable for Google to index them.<p>Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to compete in the same space as Google. They are also spending lots of money and manpower to build their search engine. But, by using Google's search results to improve their own product, they are acting as a parasite. Google gets no benefit from Microsoft using their data.<p>So to sum up my own summary: Google is a mass symbiote, Microsoft is a parasite.

I had to reread the original Google article to verify a point. The signal Bing is alleged to be using is that users CLICKED on the result that came up ... not the results that just came up first in Google upon a search query. And these are users who agreed to install the Bing toolbar!<p>Here's a hypothesis. I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. This might explain why their "honeypot-take" rate was only 8%. This is a subtle point. So ... imagine if you are the coder who wrote this signal collection feature. Would you capture "term in search box,next URL clicked" OR would you capture "if search box search engine == BING or Yahoo or something else then capture term in search box, next URL clicked".<p>Let me propose an alternative experiment. The test clickers should have clicked on the second or third (or some position N where N &#62; 1) link. This would have demonstrated if Bing is using the actual click information or the search results themselves directly. The former seems completely fair on Bing's part. The latter <i>might</i> be debatable. My point is this ... the Google geniuses fail to distinct these two cases and are muddling it up for the PR drones. This waste everyone's time and productivity. Moreover, they belittle the hard-work of engineers and scientists. It is sad that this is what it has come to.

Oh jeez, not again. <i>This is the Microsoft we know and love to hate, less so now that it is falling apart and must be pitied as an underdog.</i><p>Let's see:<p>Market cap: Microsoft - 239.49B, Google - 195.50B. Revenue: Microsoft - 66.69B, Google - 29.32B. Profit margin: Microsoft - 30.84%, Google - 29.01%.<p>Falling apart. Right...

First article I've read in a while that's taking Microsoft's side in the whole situation. Every paragraph of this screams publicity. I am just wondering here if this is a PR tactic. Here I would be happy to see a balanced review of both companies behavior but this is just one sided bashing.<p>&#60;quote&#62;Shame on your pretentious, obnoxious, indefensibly egregious double standard in the field of using public information to turn a profit.&#60;/quote&#62; &#60;&#60;-- Ironically, Bing is doing the same and unlike content creators who can opt out by putting a robots.txt file Google cannot opt out of this because like it or not toolbar is always sending back information.<p>Google indexes public content but how it aggregates it and displays it is their deed. The ordering, etc is Google's work not content creators.Copying it is just like copying an IP. I would love to see this go to court and be fought.

This is starting to get interesting.<p>Google makes money aggregating other people's content. What happens when people aggregate Google's content? What's fair?

Hmm. It might just be me, but I get the feeling that they aren't exactly fans of Google?!

I find it amusing that Dilger mentions Overture, which bought alltheweb from FAST in 2003. FAST, of course, was later acquired by Microsoft in 2008. The number of connections among the major search companies is rather amusing, if not necessarily surprising.

I have a feeling that people's reaction on this is biased by the fact that one of the two companies is Microsoft. What happened here it's not ethically correct, but come on guys, we must be honest. This is business, it's about billions, it's about market shares. It's not a news that money is not ethical.<p>Google collects data too, Google does its own shit like everybody else, like Microsoft. Google has its own toolbar too. And all this story seems more a marketing move against Bing.<p>What I want now to happen is to have more competition, instead of crying Google should work hard to be unbeatable and competitive. History teaches us a copy it's never better than the original.

I'll try to make my point again. There is one school of thinking that Google is profiting by farming information from the Internet, literally on the back of many people's labor. You can prove this by running a "Google Sting", that is known as "Google bombing". By having many people setting up honeypot to link an arbitrary keyword to certain URL, you seem to be able to fool Google to artifically associate such keyword with the URL, thus "proving" Google is profiting from your labor. I don't really buy this logic. But Google's accusation of Bing steal from them seems very close to this line of framing.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the article switches back and forth between serif and sans-serif font?

<a href="http://createasearchengine.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://createasearchengine.appspot.com</a>

<a href="http://www.google.com/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/robots.txt</a><p>First two lines:<p>User-agent: *<p>Disallow: /search

Dilger first asks "Bing is using Google's search results to improve its own. But what’s wrong with that?"<p>If Bing uses Google's search results, then we effectively only have one major search engine. Yahoo has switched to the Bing engine, and Bing gets a big chunk of it's results from Google. So we have a search engine monopoly. That's wrong with that.<p>&#62; "This is the company that indexes blogs [...], and then makes all this information available without consent"<p>He first asks what's wrong with Bing copying Google's results, because it's public content, then says it's immoral to index public content. Double morals? Logic fail?

Imagine a playground. Young, pre-alpha nerds writhing in chaos. Little arms flailing. Faces red. "Poopy face". "Your mommy smells".<p>Nerd fight.

The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.

I think Google is being disingenuous with their "bing is copying my data" story.<p>However, please avoid linking to roughlydrafted.com. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I just wanted to point out that if you have read any of the material on the site, you will know that it is just full of flamebait articles with an absurd Apple fixation.<p>Everything Android does is copying Apple. Everything Microsoft does is wrong and stupid. If flash is not supported on iPhone it is because it is the morally correct thing to do. When Apple announced the iPhone without an SDK roughlydrafted called developers stupid for asking for an SDK and that javascript on the web is the new SDK. This post however takes the cake, you must side with Bing because Google is a greater threat to Apple than Microsoft. Seriously, how does Overture even enter into this discussion. It is tiresome to see this site linked to all over the web.

Responding to merely two points, one hopes Daniel isn't as stupid as his writing. "This is the company that indexes blogs, newspapers, and both digital and physical books, and then makes all this information available without consent in the contexts of its ads and paid search space, and is dismissal of anyone who objects to Google’s ultra liberal sense of copyright. "<p>robots.txt and noindex <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38;answer=156449" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...</a><p>And "Install the Google Toolbar and do a search of Bing, and Google actually directs your clickstream back for its own analysis"<p>Google/Matt Cutts have been very open about what they do and don't use that information for, and they aren't using click tracking.

Not really. If Google wants to publicly shame Microsoft it can and is. They're basically saying that Bing is the new "Let me Google that for you". Since they're not currently proceeding with legal motions it's basically just a smear campaign to make people think twice about Bing.<p>And there's truth to it.

Microsoft did nothing wrong. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking</a>

Google makes money out of being the #1 search engine. Concurrence from others is one thing. Concurrence from someone stealing your source code (open source or not) is a whole different story. That should be reason enough, in my humble opinion.