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.)
Comments
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.)