Google on Tuesday accused search engine rival, Microsoft’s Bing, of copying its search engine results.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]”However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google,” wrote Google in a blog post.
Google has details, including pictures and a timeline, but here’s the gist of what happened.
Google noticed that a misspelling of a search on Google ended up on Bing as its top search result. Suspecting something was amiss, Google set up a covert operation to trap Bing.
Google said it created about 100 “synthetic queries” — things like “hiybbprqag” — that would never show up in a normal search. Google even fed the results for that particular search.
Within a couple of weeks, the same search query on Bing brought up the faked result that Google fed it.
“At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality,” wrote Google. “We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.”
Needless to say Microsoft denied any wrongdoing and called Google’s tactics a “spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking.”
“It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment,” wrote Microsoft on its blog. “But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.”
“But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.”
What the heck does that mean?
After reading this, I decided to give Bing another try. The results are better than Google now, which is to say they’re not utterly useless, farmed shit.
So hooray Microsoft, for looking at what users actually click on Google (and elsewhere; it isn’t like it’s exclusive). It’s too bad Google hasn’t figured this out yet.
From everything I’ve read, it’s not clear that Google’s “sting” test adequately distinguishes “Microsoft learning from user behavior in a search-provider-neutral way” vs. “Microsoft specifically looking to see what users are selecting after performing Google searches.”
Google had their developers type in the “synthetic” search terms, and always select the first link returned by Google. What if they had always selected the 50th link returned by Google instead? Would Bing have learned to associate the synthetic terms with the 50th link, or would they have preserved Google’s #1-ranked page, regardless of what the user clicked on?
Informing search results by “correlating search terms with what users actually click next” seems like a totally reasonable thing to do when you have software running on the client, especially software whose entire reason for being (and stated behavior) is to collect data about what you search for and what you click on.
Once you’ve convinced millions of users to install your client-side tracking software, you’d be stupid NOT to attempt that kind of correlation, and you have the option of crowd-sourcing “pagerank” while avoiding the cost of a high-limit Google API key.
Poor Google, who just digitized the world’s books and roads without asking, and who caches copyrighted binaries all day long, crying about someone benefitting from their “long tail” creativity. Guess there’s some life left in the client-side after all, eh guys?
Wow, MS’ apologists? The fact that you can type in something like afhdshjacds and Bing returns the exact same results as Google says they are copying. It’s that simple.
And?
For reliable results which should be used?a question for an ordinary searcher…answer all querries and we’ll go from there when the light is enough to walk with.Thank you Microsoft!
Google, as usual, is whining. Nevertheless, I’m not sure how Microsoft can be defended. It is a smart business move to leverage your monopolistic control to dominate as much as possible, but it does not reflect well on the creativity nor brain power of your company. Rather than finding a way to create a demonstrably better product than Google, they are just trying to do what they can to mimic it in order to take market share away from competitors. This has been Microsoft’s story for years. It has made them very rich, but it has also drained them of the innovativeness that they possessed. This story is just another indictment of Microsoft’s inability to do anything except make money. Criminal? No. Commendable? Absolutely not.
++
MS would have been in the wrong if they’d been caught hacking Google’s data centers (of course), but that’s not what happened.
What they did (as nearly as I can tell), is they added a level of abstraction on top of searches. That really seems like small potatoes, and Google’s fury seems disproportionate. What they’re upset about is that they want to dictate on what terms their underdog competitors compete, though when they’re the underdog it’s no-holds-barred.
But I think that MS will probably have to drop this practice, since Google has now shown how to poison Bing’s well and mess with its search results. We don’t know to what extent a group of malicious users can actually ruin Bing’s search results for REAL search terms, and I bet MS doesn’t either, yet. Notice that if malicious users DO start going around doing this, they got the idea and the motivation for their malice from Google. Don’t be evil, guys.
“At Google we strongly believe in innovation . . .”
*cough* Android *cough*
Seems sort of karmic to me, but whatever. I don’t think Microsoft can be defended either, but I’d rather use Bing. They haven’t been collecting data on me for years, I can start fresh and keep it more private on my end. I stopped using all of Google’s stuff last year, haven’t missed it, stopped using Microsoft’s non-Bing products in 2008, haven’t missed them either.
> Google has now shown how to poison Bing’s well
Anything for we script kiddies to run?
Has this issue been sorted out? Clearly the Internet marketers rely on both results for their business and it is frustrating to have this kind of “cheating” in the industry. One can’t help but wonder why both prosper when there are other companies that are striving and yet giving honest production of results. If this is the case it runs down to the level of commercialism not quality.
Many observers have seen information as being vulnerable to originality attacks in the current spate of posting actions that is increasingly common place within the internet industry. The intellectual property war in the technology field is pushing companies like Google into a content quest spree.
I was browsing on Google when I come across your blog and I must say the information found on your site is very valuable! now who will disagree with me that google is frequently used than Bing!