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Comment by onecommentayear | Hacker News Reader

Imagine I launch a search engine with no data. Then I feed it with urls IE users click on after their google search. I will eventually end up with an exact copy of google database. So I think that this technique can be called "copying". Now if Bing uses this technique for 0.1% of their data, then it can be said that 0.1% of their data are copied from Google database.

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That's a straw man argument. That's not what they did. They had a search engine with data (lots of it), using many of the same factors that Google does (page/domain authority, on-page markup, etc). The feed that algorithm a lot of data. One bit of data they feed it is search behvior of toolbar users (presumably ALL search engines).

In your scenario, that'd be a copy. In the reality scenario (described above), I think it's not.

Ironically, you are refuting as a straw man a proposition I never made. I have never claimed Bing did that. I just highlight the fact the way they get data from google is technically a copy, since it has the capacity to duplicate the entire google database (which again is not what they are doing).

search behvior of toolbar users (presumably ALL search engines)

The situation is even less compelling than this. There's no evidence to suggest it's not the complete navigation behaviour of toolbar users, not just when they're on search engines.

If you write a book that use some extracts of another book, you have copied those extract. Even if there is some other content in your book

Stop using the c... word. Call it user behavior analysis side effect.

What do you suppose google does when they are faced with a novel query and their algorithm returns 10 equally good results as matches? At that point you might as well provide a whole bunch of users some permutation of the matches and take into account which links are clicked on the most. This is exactly what bing is doing and if you crawl the web then you will indeed end up with google's database, the only difference will be how you rank results.

That's not what bing is doing in this case. What bing is doing is taking information from Google, as collected by users, and presenting that information to their own users.

Ya, and? They are also taking information from a whole bunch of other sites collected by their users and incorporating that information into ranking search results. I don't really see how this is inherently wrong.

I'm not saying that it's inherently wrong, I was attempting to explain to you how your example (Google using A/B testing to determine which results are the most relevant) had no relation to what bing is doing.

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