Bing versus Google, some observations

Jacques suggests that this is all about those 9 results that Google was able to "force" into Bing's index. But -- unless Google are simply lying about this -- the point isn't really those 9 results; they are just the clearest evidence Google has of shady behaviour by Microsoft.<p>Google claim that they saw lots of (less obvious) evidence of Bing mining search results from Google before they began their sneaky test, and the point of the test was simply to confirm that Microsoft is doing what they thought.<p>This is not about whether Bing is easy to "game" -- whether Google can get nonsense into Bing's index by sneaky means. It's about whether <i>real</i> Bing searches commonly derive their results from Google.<p>Imagine that I think you're reading my email and using the information in it to play the stock market (maybe I have secret insider information about some companies, or something). So I do a test: I arrange to be sent a bunch of email that, if you acted on it, would make you buy particular companies' shares that you'd otherwise have no reason even to have heard of. And, lo, you do that for 10% of the companies involved. Would anyone, looking at that, say that the real news is that I was unable to "game" your stock market transactions effectively, and that your spam filters caught 90% of the junk I tried to inject into your information?

While I find the thought interesting, that Microsoft may have google-specific code to filter out redirects, I don't like the notion that Google should not complain because it allegedly ignores copyrights.<p>I see a difference between aggregating content and presenting it <i>and mentioning the source</i> and just plain copying (such as spell corrections) with no mention of no source.

Mentioning the google redirect is a point I haven't seen yet and extremely valid. "Anonymous click data", as Bing said, can't account for what was seen.<p>But I think the author focused too much in the "9%" part. Who knows what Google did with the other 91%? Maybe they were trying different approaches, which actually would be the most sensible thing to do.

Jacques brings up an excellent point about how Google regards copyright. Here's IP of Microsoft directly from Google:<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=-ANomF3oARkC&#38;printsec=frontcover&#38;dq=microsoft+press+books&#38;hl=en&#38;ei=hb9KTbyLEoPGlQezx9Ep&#38;sa=X&#38;oi=book_result&#38;ct=book-preview-link&#38;resnum=5&#38;ved=0CFcQuwUwBA#v=onepage&#38;q=microsoft%20press%20books&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=-ANomF3oARkC&#38;printsec=f...</a>

I seem to be the only one that keeps scratching his head thinking ... what is the problem here?<p>I have no issue whatsoever with Bing analyzing the data sent by <i>opt-in users</i> that is further processed to help increase its search relevancy results.<p>I would not care if Bing even sent Google synthetic and organic search terms directly, to analyze and make use of the results.<p>Remember, Google uses you (the searcher) as a <i>product</i> that is sold to the real customers: the adwords and adsense clients.<p>Google scans the net of content <i>that they do not own</i>, and makes an enormous amount of profit in return.<p>Google owns nothing. You owe Google nothing.

A long, long time ago I decided to build a machine to pass the Turing test. Part of this involved giving 1000's of people microphones to record the questions they asked and responses they received in normal life. This data was streamed directly to my machine. I then programmed my machine with a complex algorithm that used this data, along with data from many other sources, to attempt to produce human like responses to questions it received. Unfortunately, a group of friends who applied for the microphones decided to ruin my attempt to pass the Turing test by grouping together and repeatedly asking a friend, Jim, 100 different nonsensical questions to which Jim, who was in on the trick, gave pre-determined responses. When I finally finished I put my machine in a box and asked the public to ask it questions. It was doing pretty well for a while since no one could distinguish it from a human. Then Jim and his buddies turned up. They asked it the 100 nonsensical questions, to which, for 7 of them, it gave the same response as Jim had. Jim got very angry. “This machine is copying me!” said Jim.

Interesting point that Microsoft may have special code to filter out google redirects.<p>On the other hand, do we know the percentage of searches that actually get redirects as results? The 'honeypot' was rather small, so the redirects just might have been too little to appear as a signal in Bing.

I'm just glad to see I'm not the only one who's been led to think: if Google can demonstrate that Microsoft is picking up search correlations from the Google site, and Microsoft just explained that, no, it's just that we pull in clickstream data, then couldn't one feed synthetic clickstream data to Bing as a blackhat SEO technique? That seems like much less work that setting up content farms or botnet clickfraud.

If I were building a toolbar that followed tracked people's clicks, I would take some measures to have it record the 'final' URL loaded by the browser and not the naive link from the DOM. There are all sorts of redirectors in use and not working around them generically would give distorted results.<p>The lack of google redirects in bing's results doesn't look like proof, or even a smoking gun to me.

For your second point, what evidence do you have that all click results that point to google redirects aren't simply discarded?