Just after Christmas we wrote a post on the "Increasing
Uselessness of Google search" which (if we may say so ourselves) helped kick off a furore which still continues, the latest episode this week being a debate between Google, Bing and newcomer Blekko - over to Vivek Wahwa,
who emceed' it:
I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft. As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of “evil” monopolist; Microsoft, the “good” contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.
........
At the conference, I gave my spiel on my vision of search: how I want my computer to serve me and tell me what I want to know, rather than my having to cater to its whims by entering specific keywords in a text box and reading through text links—which are often baited by spammers. I challenged Matt to tell everyone what Google was doing about the spam. Matt, instead, went on the warpath and accused Bing of stealing Google’s information. He disclosed a sting operation that his team had run. He expressed outrage at Microsoft’s ethics. Harry Shum fired back, defended Bing, and accused Google of playing games.
Cue media frenzy - but when Vivek says that Google has "changed the argument" away from spammy search and how Google's money is made, I think he is wrong - at least outside the Valley where maybe more bloggers are in the Googleshadow - here in the Uk it seems to be seen quite clearly. Here is the
Torygraph:
Google’s Search Fellow Amit Singhal complained via Twitter that Bing was copying Google’s results. That should tell you everything you need to know about the scale of this dispute: serious accusations of theft of intellectual property, even in Silicon Valley, are made in court.
Here is
e-Consultancy:
First, Bing isn't copying Google's results. It's not looking at Google's results for particular searches and then changing the order of its own results to reflect these. This really would be "stealing" Google's results. Instead, Bing is using, as one of the signals to decide the order of its own results, which URLs people click on when they search for things on Google. If anything, Bing is in our search result pages stealing our click through data.
Puremango:
When Google set up their experiment, they created special pages on their site which contained words which didn’t exist anywhere else on the web, then they installed Bing toolbar and clicked on links from those ‘synthetic’ pages. Bing toolbar sent MS that data, just like it would for any page, and their system incorporated that clickstream data into the other signals just as normal.
But what that meant was that when Google then went to Bing and searched for those unique words, all the other signals didn’t have any input at all; the only data Bing had was from their clickstream signal, and so that was what the system used. It’s not surprising that Bing returned the same pages as Google did, because that was all the data that existed in the whole world about that query! Bing didn’t collect that data because it was from Google, Bing collected it because it was from Bing toolbar users.
Slashdot wasn't fooled either, as this exchange early on in the comments shows:
"Apparently Google's accusations are viewed by some as a backhanded compliment."
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I don't thing they're wrong. I remember years and years ago how excited the Slashdot crowd got when Microsoft started directly addressing their superiority over Linux in their marketing propaganda. It meant Linux was enough of a threat that Microsoft was taking it seriously.
When was the last time you heard Google talk about other search engines? When it comes to searching, Google's been the undisputed market leader for a long time. For them to seriously acknowledge Bing, even if it's solely in the form of criticism, is still a big step.
.......
I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.
1. Step 1: User opts in to report anonymous clickthrough data to Bing
2. Step 2: User searches for a term, chooses a search result
3. Step 3: Microsoft gets the data and compares it against relevent information for that search term.
Since google chose a random, unique for their search term, there is nothing to compare the user behavior with so it receives a disproportionately high amount of weight. With actual search terms, what a user searches for on google will have significantly less weight in the rankings, and depending on their algorithm could be next to inconsequential.
But the fact remains that looking at how customers use the competition (especially the frontrunner) is prevalent in all industries, and is a really smart idea from a business standpoint, and only serves to benefit your customers. By the looks of Google's optional photo homepage, they are guilty of it too (and if they weren't doing more I would be shocked). It seems the only people who are upset about this are Google, and people loyal to Google (most /. users).
Conclusion - This is a Googleblink!
(Update - Kara Swisher reckons it's
got Larry Page written all over it - a blink indeed)
