Posts tagged Bing’s
So, Bing’s Copying Off Google: What Now, Google?
Feb 4th
If you’ve missed it, there’s practically been a spy novel written over the past couple of days about Bing copying Google’s search results. The whole thing started with a novella by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, which related the tale of Google’s honeypot trap to catch Bing in the act of copying its search results. Ever since, the two companies have been battling it out in public, accusing and denying, in blog posts, tweets and more blog posts, but one question still remains – what now?
Even if the move wasn’t intentional on Microsoft’s end, the end result is the same – Bing search results that more closely mirror Google’s search results. One ex-Googler has some thoughts on how this can change how Google approaches search, which he shared earlier today on Q&A site Quora.
Sponsor
The Short Version
First, if you’re in the mood for a great but long read, take a look at Danny Sullivan’s story that broke open the whole debacle. There’s mystery, there’s intrigue and there are diagrams. The long and short of it is that Google started making up "words" that no one would actually search for – "hiybbprqag" for example – and then linking them to unrelated results. The gotcha moment came when Google engineers searched Bing for those "words" (after weeks of using Internet Explorer, searching for those “words”) and came up with those same results.
In other words, Bing was coming up with search results for something that only Googlers were searching for using Google on Internet Explorer. (If you’ve seen The Departed, it’s very much like the envelope that outs the rat.) Internet Explorer and the Bing toolbar had been collecting anonymous click data and, according to Bing, this data was one of more than “1,000 different signals and features in [its] ranking algorithm.” So, it wasn’t that Bing was directly copying results, said Microsoft, but that it was taking click data into account. Ever since Sullivan’s post, the two companies have been going at it – and that’s the very short version of it all.
Why Innovate?
Edmond Lau, formerly a part of the search team at Google, says that “the result of this discovery will be to diminish Google’s incentive to innovate in vanilla search quality ranking and to increase its efforts on other differentiating search features.”
Lau points out that, unless Google has a legal argument against Bing’s usage of click data, Microsoft will likely continue with the practice. Over time, he posits, Bings search results will likely move closer to Google’s, taking away a key incentive on Google’s end to innovate its search product.
“Any new innovations in ranking by Google could in theory quickly become assimilated into Bing’s search results, reducing Google’s incentive to innovate in the ranking space,” writes Lau. “Therefore, in order to maintain its competitive edge, Google will need to both try to reduce Bing’s ability to copy its results, and it will need to significantly increase its efforts on other important areas in the search experience outside of ranking.”
What’s Google’s Next Move?
Lau suggests that Google has two possible moves at this point. First, it can give Bing toolbar users worse results by “[dropping] a misspelling here or an optimization there,” thereby giving undermining Bing’s efforts and giving it only “medium-quality” results to copy. The second option, he says, is for Google to “focus more on non-ranking related improvements,” such as snippet quality, metadata extraction like IMDB data at the top of search results, query refinements such as localized results and search suggestions, more relevant ads and a better integration of universal search. In other words, Google can focus on all the neat information and context that surrounds mere search results.
“Not all is lost for Google even though Bing may be hijacking its results,” writes Lau. “Months after the summer of 2010, when Google figured that Bing had copied some of its results for the misspelled query [torsoraphy], it’s clear that Google still understands the web much better than Bing does. [...]Bing’s top result doesn’t have the spell-corrected query highlighted because Bing still isn’t able to connect the dots between the misspelled and corrected query. I’m not too worried for Google web search.”
What do you think? Would Google lower the quality on some search results just to keep Bing from copying it? From what we’ve read, information is not collected by the Bing toolbar alone, but by Internet Explorer use, as well, which makes up a majority of Web browsers worldwide. It seems like lowering the quality of your search results to a majority of users worldwide simply to stop someone from copying your answers would be counterproductive. Instead, we’re willing to bet that Google continues, as it has, to focus on enhancing all of these “non-ranking related improvements.” Google is continually pushing to make search results more customized to the individual user, according to previous search results, social context, location, and more. Is this the type of thing that could be simply copied by click data? We’re not so sure.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Hires Bing’s Principle Scientist Away From Microsoft
Jan 26th
Alek Kołcz, Principle Scientist at Microsoft’s search engine Bing, appears to have left the company and joined Twitter this week. Kołcz’s Twitter messages are protected and he hasn’t changed any of his profiles online, but we noticed tonight that he’s been added to the list of staff members on the Twitter website. The company has yet to respond to our request for comment.
Kołcz spent nearly five years at Microsoft after leaving AOL where he was a system architect. He now joins his old friends from the AOL days, the search scientists who came to Twitter in the Summize acquisition of 2008. According to LinkedIn, Kołcz will be the 8th former Microsoft employee at Twitter. Twitter’s full staff consists of 362 people.
Sponsor
Kołcz is an info-science heavy, having published numerous research articles in publications like The Journal of Supercomputing, Neurocomputing and Neural Networks. He appears to have a special affinity for spam crushing, something Twitter must struggle with a whole lot. As use of the service grows, so too will the importance of its search – especially given the very public nature of Twitter’s data.
Bing announced that it was including Twitter updates in its search results more than a year ago, in what was presumed to be one of Twitter’s first big money-making deals.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Bing’s 2010 Top Searches: Kim Kardashian Dashes to Top Spot
Dec 1st
On Bing, celebrity searches were hot in 2010, and Kim Kardashian was the hottest of them all. Kardashian beat closest competitor Sandra Bullock by 20 percent.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Bing’s Former Program Manager Now Giving SEO Advice In Bing Forums – Search Engine Roundtable
Oct 12th
|
Bing's Former Program Manager Now Giving SEO Advice In Bing Forums
Search Engine Roundtable But yesterday he came back to life offering SEO advice for Bing, as a non-Bing employee. If the page is indexed and if it fits your quality guidelines, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Did Google Instant Clip Bing’s Wings? – MediaPost Publications (blog)
Sep 21st
 NDTV.com |
Did Google Instant Clip Bing's Wings?
MediaPost Publications (blog) Rather than an SEO killer or search game changer, Matt Van Wagner, founder and president of search engine marketing firm Find Me Faster, just calls Instant … Will Google Instant affect SEO? Google Instant, SEO, and the Future of Search To Catch Google's Eye, Websites Engage in a Wild West Rivalry |
View full post on SEO – Google News
The Search Alliance is Here: Titan SEO Explains Yahoo and Bing’s Transition – PR Newswire (press release)
Aug 30th
|
The Search Alliance is Here: Titan SEO Explains Yahoo and Bing's Transition
PR Newswire (press release) According to Titan SEO's Mackenzie Alvarez, "Based on recent market share data, Bing's platform will be powering close to 30% of the market. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Swine Flu Recovery, Google PageRank Update, Bing’s Traffic Spike & More
Jan 14th
www.SERoundtable.com – I’m back this week after surviving the possible Swine Flu and getting the new iPhone. This week, we quickly talk about the new and frequent toolbar PageRank update. We also discuss Bing’s search spike, possibly due to spam tests and how you may want to reallocate your marketing budgets. Google is asking webmasters for suggestions, so go get it. Google told us why they shorten URLs. Google AdSense is adding up and I explain why. Google tests new commission or pay for …
