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If this joint toolbar comes to fruition, which it never will, the crowd will decide the obvious winner for practically all queries. At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?

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At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?

Speed of innovation. It's not our job to make it easy for them to have diffentiation. I just want great results. The more parity we give them with respect to data, the harder they'll have work to innovate in order to differentiate. AFAICT, that benefits us the users.

I didn't suggest it should be our job to make it easy for them. I want great results too and I want it without ads and spam getting in the way as well. In fact there should be more tools integrated into browsers to allow the user to own their own click stream and browsing pattern data and "sell" it to the highest bidder. Do you know of such tools? I don't. We are even at the point both in terms of computational power and data storage costs that each user could potentially have their own web crawler/search engine. The bing and google bars basically steal this information from users and in return provide little to no improvement on search results. The point I was making was that there is absolutely no incentive on either side to share knowledge and converge onto a high quality, common query result set because both companies try really really hard to not appear like the other guy and the result set is part of this.

I don't. It's too bad that the whole discussion happening is about "cheating" or not. And not about using everything available for better search.

It would be great to see the discussion change.

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