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.
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.
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 real Bing searches commonly derive their results from Google.
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?
If Google think they have other evidence, let's see it. The burden of proof is on the accuser, I think.
BTW, that's not necessarily about whether they are "lying". The other evidence they think they have could be convincing to them (because, e.g., they already have a strong predisposition to believe that they are inherently far better than anyone else, and therefore anyone building a competitive search engine could only possibly be copying them - this is a caricature, but you get the idea) but not necessarily convincing to others.
Why should Google show other evidence? The evidence they have provided is enough for me to be suspicious: How could Bing possibly come up with the same odd spell correction without copying from Google?
Yes, it could be a side effect of some machine learning algorithm. But Bing never explained that, which would have been very easy if it was the case.
What Google presented was enough to show that there exist possible situations where an individual (query, URL) pair's presence in Google's search results causes it to appear in Bing's. That definitely demonstrates that Google has a nonzero influence on Bing, and you can call it "copying" if you like - on the level of individual (query, URL) pairs.
I personally don't think there's anything wrong with this, in itself. I think an individual (query, URL) pair is small enough to be 'fair use', more or less. But it's another matter (to me) if this sort of thing is happening often enough, and in important enough cases, to have a strong aggregate effect on the Bing search engine as a whole. Google has insinuated that they believe this to be the case, but they haven't shown it. That was what the post above mine was about and that was what mine was about.
If you think that what they actually did demonstrate is bad enough in itself, none of this matters.
This is also true, but is sort of tangential to the point we were discussing. (Personally, I think they probably were special-casing Google, at least insofar as it was one of a list of set URL patterns it knew how to parse.)
I like your stock market insider information analogy because it illustrates the flaw in Google's experiment very well. And very few people seem to realize it. I need to modify it slightly though to make it more analogous.
Suppose your financial advisor (Google) was suspecting that someone (Bing) was stealing their confidential financial reports on stocks. Suppose your financial advisor told you (Google Engineer) to buy 100 random shares (search and click on 100 specific search terms) and see if the suspect (Bing) acted on it.
Even if the suspect bought 100% of the shares (Bing indexes all the search terms with the irrelevant links), you still haven't proven the suspect is stealing information from the financial advisor because there's more than one source this information could have come from. It could have come from you (Google Engineer doing the clicking) or it could have come from your financial advisor (Google itself). A way to solve this issue is if you (Google engineer) had another financial advisor (another website) which told you to buy certain companies. If the suspect didn't act on those shares then you would have MUCH more conclusive evidence that the suspect was stealing from the financial advisor represented by Google.
For the point you are trying to make, the email analogy falls flat because it is not really an unsuccessful technology which creates the purchases but an appeal to human emotion. It's not as if an email can make a person take an action in the same way that a data packet can determine the actions of a computer.
(Determining the degree to which Google's methods are similar to a 419 scam is an exercise for the reader).
Comments
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.
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.
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 real Bing searches commonly derive their results from Google.
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?
If Google think they have other evidence, let's see it. The burden of proof is on the accuser, I think.
BTW, that's not necessarily about whether they are "lying". The other evidence they think they have could be convincing to them (because, e.g., they already have a strong predisposition to believe that they are inherently far better than anyone else, and therefore anyone building a competitive search engine could only possibly be copying them - this is a caricature, but you get the idea) but not necessarily convincing to others.
Why should Google show other evidence? The evidence they have provided is enough for me to be suspicious: How could Bing possibly come up with the same odd spell correction without copying from Google?
Yes, it could be a side effect of some machine learning algorithm. But Bing never explained that, which would have been very easy if it was the case.
I was responding to the post above mine.
What Google presented was enough to show that there exist possible situations where an individual (query, URL) pair's presence in Google's search results causes it to appear in Bing's. That definitely demonstrates that Google has a nonzero influence on Bing, and you can call it "copying" if you like - on the level of individual (query, URL) pairs.
I personally don't think there's anything wrong with this, in itself. I think an individual (query, URL) pair is small enough to be 'fair use', more or less. But it's another matter (to me) if this sort of thing is happening often enough, and in important enough cases, to have a strong aggregate effect on the Bing search engine as a whole. Google has insinuated that they believe this to be the case, but they haven't shown it. That was what the post above mine was about and that was what mine was about.
If you think that what they actually did demonstrate is bad enough in itself, none of this matters.
Because they did not prove Bing specifically targets results from Google.
This is also true, but is sort of tangential to the point we were discussing. (Personally, I think they probably were special-casing Google, at least insofar as it was one of a list of set URL patterns it knew how to parse.)
I like your stock market insider information analogy because it illustrates the flaw in Google's experiment very well. And very few people seem to realize it. I need to modify it slightly though to make it more analogous.
Suppose your financial advisor (Google) was suspecting that someone (Bing) was stealing their confidential financial reports on stocks. Suppose your financial advisor told you (Google Engineer) to buy 100 random shares (search and click on 100 specific search terms) and see if the suspect (Bing) acted on it.
Even if the suspect bought 100% of the shares (Bing indexes all the search terms with the irrelevant links), you still haven't proven the suspect is stealing information from the financial advisor because there's more than one source this information could have come from. It could have come from you (Google Engineer doing the clicking) or it could have come from your financial advisor (Google itself). A way to solve this issue is if you (Google engineer) had another financial advisor (another website) which told you to buy certain companies. If the suspect didn't act on those shares then you would have MUCH more conclusive evidence that the suspect was stealing from the financial advisor represented by Google.
For the point you are trying to make, the email analogy falls flat because it is not really an unsuccessful technology which creates the purchases but an appeal to human emotion. It's not as if an email can make a person take an action in the same way that a data packet can determine the actions of a computer.
(Determining the degree to which Google's methods are similar to a 419 scam is an exercise for the reader).
I think the real story would be when you were collared by the SEC for insider trading.