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Search Engine Land has published an article detailing a "sting operation" that has led Google to accuse Bing of cheating on its search results. As the story goes, last year Google noticed that its competitor was showing very similar top results for misspelled searches. Suspecting shenanigans, the search giant manually placed a bogus page as the top result for 100 synthetic searches that few, if any people would actually enter (queries like hiybbprqag).
For the top results, Google inserted pages with no relevance to the search queries, so it would be pretty damning if Bing started showing the same results. Google thought Microsoft might have been copying results from data sent by Internet Explorer users, so it had a group of engineers run the test queries from IE with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled. Sure enough, less than two weeks later, some of the obscure results began appearing on Bing.
Microsoft promptly responded to the allegations in a blog post, calling the story 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. But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience," the Bing team said. "We all learn from our collective customers, and we all should."
"We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users," Microsoft explained. Is the company truly cheating though? Some say Bing is leeching off Google's innovation while others see Bing as a clever underdog. Where do you stand?
User Comments: 31
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negroplasty said:
Cheating if you ask me. The reason I use Google to search is because their results are relevant and get me where I need to go, with a few -filters and quotations here and there, granted, but better than any other engine I've tried to date.
Pretty convincing evidence as well...
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If this is the case whats the point of going to Bing if its going to give you the same results as Google
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LOL its microsoft why doesn't this suprise me,they copied windows from apple and apple copied from xerox,not sure where xerox copied from though LOL
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I read Microsoft's blog post, and they pretty much (though indirectly) admitted they did "copy" Google.
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if you can't beat'em, copy'em!
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mattfrompa said:
So i still have no reason to use bing? okay
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SUCK IT!!! GOOGLE!!!
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Cota said:
I here stand to sue an one who eats rice krispies whit marmalade >:\
But i mean, is it really bad to let Microsoft screw around to Skyne..... Google?, i still give a capuchino about bing and who the hell uses bars on their explorer?
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Suck my google?
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I here stand to sue an one who eats rice krispies whit marmalade >:\
But i mean, is it really bad to let Microsoft screw around to Skyne..... Google?, i still give a capuchino about bing and who the hell uses bars on their explorer?
This is mostly spelled correctly, but incoherent nonetheless.
Suck my google?Is this real Aussie slang, or did you just make that up? -
Nothing to do with Aussie slang 'mate'... It was an ill-fated reply to kamz999. Though it was rudely intercepted by that charming chunk of charitable conversation by the lovely Cota.
Are you the internet police? >:3
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captaincranky said:I here stand to sue an one who eats rice krispies whit marmalade >:\
But i mean, is it really bad to let Microsoft screw around to Skyne..... Google?, i still give a capuchino about bing and who the hell uses bars on their explorer?
This is mostly spelled correctly, but incoherent nonetheless.
Suck my google?Is this real Aussie slang, or did you just make that up?Actually, i probably should have quoted you, so that you can read your quote's within a quote. Yo dawg, how's internet policing going?
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Microsoft are such douche bags. Remember when they sued some guy for having a website named MikeRoweSoft.com? I guess being similar isn't ok but blatant copying is! F U Microsoft! I'm putting a chip in my Xbox360, that will calm me down.
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lol guest. Such hate for Microsoft yet 95% of us use a microsoft product everyday (even if u didn't pay for it, Pirates)
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At one time Microsoft was skyn... now is google... stop it it used to be fun but for a long couple of years IT HAS NOT BEEN.
Rant over... Microsoft, you have earned a couple million cracked windows to bug on.
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it's the final proof that Microsoft is a consolidated company !More yoopies, no engineers and lots and lots of lawyers.(sadly, Sony corp is heading the same way...no more good ideas...)
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I don't know about this but Google will be the next Microsoft. With its finger in every pie. Mark my words, mortals.
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I am glad there is competition between these companies. I certainly do not want only one source for my searching ability. If you think about it, Google holds significant power on how it tailors search results. I might go as far to say, if they have tailored these results, how many other results are we unaware of.I am definitely not a fan of some of Microsoft's accomplishments but they have developed some GREAT pieces of software. They also have come up with a platform that most of the things we take for granted run on (like Crysis 2).
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I believe Google. They created a very nice test case to determine whether Bing is 'sucking' results off Google. Based on the setup and the outcome, Bing does not seem to be truly searching the internet. They're searching other search engines. Might as well cut out the middleman and just use Google.
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it's a search engine, they're free. i don't care.
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Looks pretty bad for Bing here....But hey, who cares?
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Staffforeverzero89 said:
it's a search engine, they're free. i don't care.
I find something surprisingly insightful about this.
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So all the benefits of Google's accuracy without the increasing scaryness and omnipotence of Google? Ok!
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Many, if not most retail operations, price shop the competition, then bring their prices into line with those competitors.
I suppose that Bing, "shopping" their competition is understandable.
Whether they should be able to use the results could be the subject perhaps, of a college level semester in Ethics.
With that being said, let me apply, "Juvenile Delinquent Torrent Logic", to the issue.
Since Google still has the original "copy" of the search results, therefore "nothing has been stolen"! So therefore, Bing should be able to "download" all of Google's search results they choose to.
So now, why don't cha all go back to torrenting copyrighted programs, games, movies, and music, free of charge, and leave Google and Bing alone to fight it out amongst themselves.
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captaincranky said:
So now, why don't cha all go back to torrenting copyrighted programs, games, movies, and music, free of charge, and leave Google and Bing alone to fight it out amongst themselves.
I yi Captain, arrrrrrh
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