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The Official Google Blog
By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google’s results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.
I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.
Read the article. The evidence is pretty convincing.
Found by Cinàedh.
So it’s OK for Google to trawl the internet indexing other people’s site content and sell it as their own, but it’s not OK to index their site. Sorry, I really can’t bring myself to feel sorry for these greedy, entitled, holier-than-thou hypocrites.
The story is more BS than that. Google gets its superior search results partly because they rank pages based on what users click on when shown search results.
Now Microsoft is not copying Google search results directly, ie you search for Dvorak, Bing sends a search for Dvorak to Google, and gives you the results. What they are doing is learning from the results of other people’s searches on Google, through IE and the Bing Toolbar.
This is a setup. Google had their engineers install IE and Bing, with all of the sharing options turned on, then they went to Google and searched for certain phrases and clicked on the results. Based on this Bing added to its database of what searches people are interested in, just as Google does.
#1, Rupert Murdoch checking-in, I see.
Someone uses Bing?
What is a Bing, anyway? It’s a noise made by a slot machine to confuse you while you’re being robbed, right?
Wow! IE8 calls home. I bet Chrome never does that.
What? Microsoft fails to actually innovate and just appropriates other people’s stuff? Well, that is their basic business model isn’t it? That and drive everyone else out of business until you have a monopoly and can gouge your customers endlessly for overweight, buggy, insecure software.
People don’t seem to understand that the only goal of business is profit, and the only limit to attaining that goal is the law. Further, in this case, it is hard to see how consumers aren’t the winners.
Everybody in business knows how the game is played. The only interesting thing here is that Google thrust this incident directly into the court of public opinion, where there is little understanding of how business actually works. I can guarantee that there will be a spectacular retaliation by Microsoft–should be fun to watch.
I searched for several of the examples and NONE of the results from Bing were the same as the (generally crappier – more geared to sell me crap I don’t need) google ones.
This guy just has an anti-MS axe to grind and thinks its okay to lie about shit to get webpage hits.
Odd how he never mentioned how the new google image search looks EXACTLY the same as the Bing images search did a month before, eh…
Or how you can customize google to display a background picture every day, just like Bing did (also many months before).
Pot, let me introduce the kettle.
What they do is get reports for IE on what sites IE users visit, from IE users who agreed to share this information.
If Google isn’t doing the same thing with Google Chrome they are less intelligent than I think they are.
Microsoft will forever be a corporate desktop OS system, but that’s ALL they’ll ever be.
They didn’t make themselves any friends on the way up, what with monopolistic business practices and all, and nobody who’s they current client (which is 90% of the business desktop clients in the world,) wants to see them succeed in any other area.
Bing is another also ran because of that, as is their Zune and their Windows 7 Mobile.
Businesses are Microsoft’s client and they will remain their clients, but don’t expect them to like it, or to let Microsoft extend their claws into any thing else.
The consumer market is an entirely different beast than the business market and Microsoft’s corporate culture is entirely incapable of navigating in those shoals.
Is this the best these companies can do?
And here I thought Bing was just a “Dogpile” linked search bar, with a fancier splash page. If Bing were to actually categorize the results, under interactive sub-headers, that one could further select and narrow things down by. That would be something worthwhile. But I haven’t seen this happen. Every time I search for anything, I get “RingTone” sites results first. It would be nice if there was a sub-header for “other” or “free”, that excluded most things being marketed. Fat chance of Microsoft doing that!
So, they fed some nonsense search string/url pair to Bing (via the opt-in toolbar) and then are surprised when it factors heavily into a search query that would otherwise have no meaningful results? And this happened 7% of the time? It sounds like MS is making proper use of the information from the toolbar.
In fact, this really has nothing to do with Google. The same test would work with Yahoo! or any other search engine (are there any?). The difference, is that they (Google) can control what is returned by the nonsense query.
An insight to how Microsoft uses information collected from the browser/toolbar to fine-tune search queries in Bing? Yes.
An example of corporate theivery? No.
I love how Microsoft and their worshipers (because Microsoft provides jobs) so cavalierly come up with excuses that 2 & 2 is 5. That attitude why Microsoft is in the position of doing what it did. There’s no need to come up with original ideas when you can be intellectually lazy.