The Bing Sting

Oh great thanks ZDNet and Microsoft for clearing it all up.

Too bad their search director didn’t get the memo that “we’re just going to flat-out deny this one” and instead explained to this search engine blog that the apparent copying was merely an inadvertent byproduct of things like their Suggested Sites which says right in the EULA that it may do exactly this and Google’s trying to make it look like some big conspiracy to rip them off and contort how that sounds to try to turn this into a big thing with their elaborate ruse.

By the way, here’s what made Google suspicious in the first place. When queries were made for things that were misspelled and Google did the Did you mean thing and then gets a subsequent query with the correct spelling, when that specific incorrect spelling was binged a few weeks later, Bing returned the search results directly without any kind of Did you mean. But if you make any other variant of the misspelled word on Bing you do get the Did you mean. Like this:

Give that a try yourself if you want, you’ll see the same, but then modify how the word is misspelled on Bing and you’ll see how it is handled differently. That’s just how it started, not the definitively damning synthetic search result sting.

In other words they’ve been grooming Bing’s accuracy, and this first became apparent in May and since then increasingly apparent not just with what probably struck you right there as minutia but with general search returns increasingly, substantially, starting to match Google’s, and the probably legal and EULA-kosher method they’ve been hitching a free ride off the Google engineers (the spelling guys were especially miffed) is, according to Google and this sounds about right to me, using IE’s Suggest Sites and/or their toolbar. Their essentially using people who use IE as a proxy to study Google extensively and use that information to modify Bing and it’s plain as day that they’ve been doing that.

They may not have sat down for a while, googling things and copying and pasting the returns, but they enabled Bing to adapt by plugging it into to information relayed to Microsoft by people using Google. It’s too complicated an accusation for Microsoft to drop everything to do damage control over. It’s tl;dr.

To compare it to horse betting, Microsoft is denying having certain horses injected with steroids or tranquilizers in order to bet more profitably which they can technically deny because rather than juicing up certain horses and other horses down themselves they paid people to work with the various horses to report back to Microsoft which horses were injected by other people before each race and modify their betting accordingly.

Either way it’s cheating. And cheating ain’t cool, it’s chilly; and chilly ain’t never been cool.

A PR stunt in the making since May with this event in mind? Or might there be some substance to it?

Along with Microsoft’s Bing director. It’s even in the privacy statement of Suggested Sites and the Bing Bar, reserving the right to do what would enable them to do exactly this. Microsoft is denying copying or indexing the indexer or whatever it is you think this is about, but the accusation is cheating, hitching a free ride to what Google engineers figured out (it’s not as easy as you might think to make an effective search engine).

It may not be illegal but how is this defensible? Because the accusation is too complicated to explain to most people (you for example)? If you were one of these engineers at Google wouldn’t you be a little bummed out by this discovery and want to call them out on it?

This thorn in their side that they’ve been monitoring since May, giving heads ups quietly to third parties to check and corroborate themselves, eventually setting up a trap … you think they just made it all up, do you think what Microsoft has been doing is perfectly cool and legit? What if this were turned around, would you tell me that you’d be buying Microsoft’s accusations or Google’s denial?

Matt: For starters, the guys being ripped off care:

It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work. I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.

I believe the man is speaking from the heart, that this is about work to him, very valuable intellectual property (how to handle search queries most effectively — Google’s bread and butter) and not vilifying Microsoft for the hell of it.

As for opting out or not opting into such things, how could anyone reading that Microsoft may use URL data you spit back to improve your whatever including search terms and extend that to reading that Microsoft may automatically study your Google experiences in order to steadily tune Bing accordingly. You don’t see that, nor do you probably even read the EULA/privacy thing, and when an IE user sees something new like Suggested Sites, sounds pretty benign, a why-not affirmative click. But even if they did get informed consent from those using IE that they’d be participating in this anywhere including and especially when on Google, that doesn’t make it right.

Presuming this is true, do you think it’s an accident that Google’s been tweaking itself in response to these “signals” from people on Google googling things and clicking and misspelling and searching for very obscure things and whatever, an accident that the data somehow has been flowing into Bing in a manner that Bing, like Skynet, uses the data, or did someone have to go out of their way to make that work?

Index the indexer, twitter, this isn’t about crawling through Google’s websites. Of course Google googles anything without a robots.txt asking it not to and adhering to that standard diligently. Most people though, including us and I’m pretty sure Twitter too, want to be all over Google, so we go so far out of our way to make sure that happens well that there’s an industry out there, lots of people making livings doing nothing but giving out tips to get your site listed more prominently on Google. Here’s how complicated it is for me to take mobilitydigest.com off within a couple days:

roòt@batteryboss.org: echo -e “User-agent\nDisallow: /” > robots.txt ; ncftp md
ncftp /mobilitydigest > put robots.txt

Seconds. For those who don’t know how to do that, create the User agent disallow in Dreamweaver, frontpage, ftp, toss it in the root directory, wait for recrawl, bye Google listing. Everyone’s entitled to do that and there are a million sites with instructions on how to do that including how to customize the file to allow certain things but not others. A funny thing to note while on the subject of robots.txt files, Rupert Murdoch, while going on and on about how Google News is stealing all of his content, .. here’s Fox News‘s robots file which goes out of its way to say hi to Google. Hi Google, here’s all our stuff, do come back again! Anyway.

This isn’t about that. Google is not doing anything to enhance their search engine with their toolbar or Chrome with exception to clocking load times which may affect rankings (and they should) but nothing else, especially nothing like what Microsoft is doing. I don’t know if there’s any IP that is of more value, and took more work to develop, than those formulas are to Google and by studying a massive amount of user experiences on Google’s site Microsoft is effectively reverse engineering and implementing that asset.

No one is better at returning the most relevant search queries as Google and no one is in the ballpark of brokering ads efficiently and effectively, in a manner that both the buyers and sellers win the most, than Google. Facebook? What, you heard they get a lot of traffic? Their ad clickthroughs, Google’s got them beat ten to one. It takes Facebook ten times as many ad impressions to produce a click as it takes Google. If anything, if you were Microsoft mining line-crossing data why would you even touch Facebook for search and ads? That would confound your data on how to handle data.

Heh.. Not bad, Ed. Was beginning to take this thread too seriously.

Yeah? Well, can you even conceptualize the way the hypothetical you at Google would defend Google from this? What, blocking everyone from visiting Google Search reporting IE as their user agent? Because that’s all I can come up with. How could this have been prevented, specifically/technically or metaphorically, anything you got.

Assuming what Microsoft has been doing is legal, I suppose you could hire lobbyists and deploy them to DC, maybe get lucky.

Outsmarted? There is no practical technical way to stop this. Google caught wind of this and set up traps to catch them irrefutanly red handed. If anything, it was Microsoft who was outsmarted as I’m guessing that today is not a day they were hoping to have. Are you not understanding how Microsoft did this? You even regard this as an achievement on their part?

So now that this has been handed off to the public with specificity, do you think Microsoft will say We did nothing wrong and btw Google steals from us or do you suppose their actions will be regarded with disdain widely enough that they’ll pull the plug on this activity regardless of however they may respond to these accusations?

Microsoft should apologize.

Google spends eight months doing their diligence that Microsoft was freeloading objectionably from their work and they, their search guys in particular, would prefer Microsoft knock it off and play straight. Lacking any other means to accomplish this, they post on their blog what no one can deny as being sufficiently damning evidence of what Microsoft had flat out denied doing earlier in the day leading to this main point:

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.

Where are you seeing this childishness?

If Google is being childish or aything less than forthright, why would Microsoft have had denied it?