This is pathetic. Not only Google has to resort to unpaid spokespersons to transmit their message, they spend their time proving the Bing Toolbar works better than expected.
Here’s the executive summary of the “Bing copies Google” fiasco:
- A lot of people notices Google isn’t so good anymore, and Bing has improved
- Google notices Bing returns the same first result (a Wikipedia page, hardly an odd choice for a first result when you are lazy or just don’t have a clue) for an unusual query
- Thinking Bing’s toolbar copies Google’s search results and transmits them back to Bing, Google
- Sets up an isolated page that normally wouldn’t be indexed and artificially sets it as the first result for a completely absurd query (something they always said couldn’t be done, btw)
- Asks a group of Google employees to search for it while using Bing’s toolbar and clicking on the first (fixed) result -the isolated page
- Waits a few weeks and then -surprise! Bing knows the page exists and also shows it as the first search result for said completely absurd query.
- Conclusion: Bing copies Google’s search results
Never mind the fact that:
- By religiously browsing the isolated page while using the Bing Toolbar, Google’s employees made sure Bing knew it existed.
- Bing indexes/analyzes the pages reported by its toolbar -that’s what it does to recommend similar pages to you, yet
- The absurd keyword isn’t part of the isolated page set up by Google, so Bing couldn’t have made the connection just by indexing -but it did. Why?
Let me ask it this way: why not? Everyone who made a Google search for a certain absurd keyword inmediately browsed to the same page. You don’t need to copy search results -just analyze user behaviour. That’s how recommendations work -you’re on page A, sometime later you are on page B. If enough people do that (specially by clicking), start recommending page B to people browsing on page A.
If page A happens to be a Google search, so what?
Pages are related by their relevant keywords: what most relevant keyword in a search page than the query itself?
And what most obvious recommendation than being a first search result?
So that’s it: Google proved Bing mines data from its users via its toolbar -just like everyone who bothered to read the toolbar’s documentation knew. The only surprise is the mining seems to be smarter than everyone thought. (Bing’s official comment)
Bing has realized the folly of linking as the definite metric of relevancy and the practical impossibilities of traversing today’s huge Web.
Don’t index webpages; index user’s actions
Links have little to do with relevance -most websites, even those otherwise reputable, bend themselves over to have lots of made-for-Google links. When was the last time you searched for a brand or personality and got the official site as the first result?
Content farms, spam, plagiarism, reposting, misinterpreting a link’s intent, Google’s proven ability to fix results -all this make relevancy by linking dubious at best.
So what did Bing? Easy -index the web their users make.
The very same thing Amazon does to recommend products to you -don’t find pages, find a trail.
While Google tries to keep you logged in Gmail while you browse AdSensed pages, Microsoft puts the ultimate cookie: a browser’s toolbar. Bing doesn’t care what spam-riddled page links to what attention-starved web magazine nor what irrelevant ad you ignored -it cares about your personal journey on your own web. Compared to this, curation (i.e. the fancy term in vogue for what used to be social bookmarking) looks lacking.
Last thoughts
The “personal web” idea is not new, and it has been done with both cookies and toolbars for years. Even Google has a toolbar although they deny it influences search results in any way -then again, we just saw how worthless is a Google denial. Social bookmarking/curation websites also have toolbars or bookmarklets.
Recommendations too are old news, as anyone who ever browsed Amazon can tell.
Heck, even this so-called ”copying” is old news: Yes, Bing Has Been Copying Google Search Results FOR YEARS
So why the fuss? Google’s mad because Bing indexed them as if they were any other site in the web.
You may be interested in:
- Contextual Semantic Publishing and the Open Index - on how to improve the current indexing model with a cloud-based publishing platform
- The problems of monetizing with online advertising - why contextual ads are a questionable choice to monetize a site, partly because current search engines aren’t that good
© 2011 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.
