Hacker News Reader

Comment by krosaen | Hacker News Reader

but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?

View on HN

What the experiment shows is that where no other data is available Bing will use what it has and that Google can successfully seed Bing on the long tail. What it doesn't show is that in typical circumstances Bing is relying on data gathered from Google searches.

Microsoft is collecting the same sort of information on Google queries that it collects on Bing queries and that Google collects on Google queries. All this is happening at the long tail where both companies are most likely using something other than webcrawling to tailor search results - afterall the whole experiment is only possible because Google can seed page rankings at will to link arbitrary terms to specific search results.

Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.

But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue

Google doesn't really want to get into a heated discussion about the evils of a search engine knowing everything you've ever searched for. Stones, glass houses, etc.

(Given Google's near-monopoly of the market, Microsoft and DDG have some amusing competitive synergy going on, don't they. DDG can criticize Google all they please for retaining user data because DDG doesn't and isn't in a position to benefit from it. Microsoft, which certainly is in a position to benefit from it, doesn't need to worry about Google calling them on it because Google is the only search engine that can actually lose market share over the issue.)

For all Google’s sins, there is a Dashboard that let you erase all you care them not to know: Google could promote that heavily in case of stone, glass house. I always assumed this would be a great way to learn more about queries: spotting what words people are ashamed to have searched for.

It could be something a registered user could set from a browser toggle, and DuckDuckGo is a very good project, or course. My point was: data portability and user control are within Google's long term interest, not being evasive about their data cache.

While it's great that Google lets you delete information, harvest-your-data-by-default is not a choice made with your best interests at heart.

This is what all toolbars do, and is largely the point of why big companies offer them and pay little software companies to make them optional installs (see Corel's WinZip, which installs the Google toolbar)

And that is explicitly stated in their tos. There's no hiding here.

Let’s agree “not hiding” is what is in the demo video. TOS… we all know they could add that you sell the soul and the virginity of your mother in there, no one would read it.

It only records that when the user has explicitly agreed to send anonymous data. chrome and Google toolbar do that too and so do most of the toolbars out there.

I think this would still leave Google with a fairly strong argument - if Bing does it for all search engines, then they're effectively copying whoever is most popular. Since it's done through Internet Explorer, which is still bundled with Windows in most places, they could try to make the argument that Microsoft is using their position in the OS market to crush competition in other markets.

Interesting angle to go through the tied market and competition policy: that's a type of authority that is far more intelligent, and precisely just prosecuted IE in Windows. However, you'd have to either have a US court acknowledge that a European was right to disagree with them in the first place, or have a European court admit that their previous decision wasn’t enough. It’s feasible, but hard.

Where you’ll be more limited with it, is that it’s apparently not IE, but the Bing Bar that is at stake—the connection is getting thinner.

If a page contains a unique word, and people who were on that page universally go to a different page, that could be enough evidence for bing to assume there's a link between the unique word and the target page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com