Posted by: kurtsh | February 3, 2011

Everything you need to know about Google’s accusations at Bing

imageUPDATE 2/5/2011:
If you read the explanation I’ve written below, you can understand how Bing does not screen scrape search results from Google. 

We capture the URLs that users click on & the search terms they use to find that URL across searches made on Google, Ask, Bing or any engine… but only from people that authorize Microsoft to do so, i.e. there’s no privacy violations taking place here.

HOWEVER… apparently, Google is screen scraping Bing.  Yup.  You read that right:  They’re doing to Bing exactly what they falsely accused Microsoft of doing. 

And what’s worse, they’re ignoring Bing’s explicit instructions to other search engines not to crawl it’s search results.  The ROBOTS.TXT file, as described by Jacques, clearly states that indexing Bing is disallowed by other web crawlers.  And Google just goes right about ignoring the DISALLOW entry.

Wow.

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ORIGINAL POST:

image_thumb2Let’s get this out of the way:  Google’s accusation that Bing steals Google’s search results are false and demonstrates their lack of understanding of how Bing’s makes use of authorized user behavior data collection. 

Microsoft does not screen scrape Google’s search results.

  1. If a user permits Microsoft to do so (via opt-in selection*), we capture user-entered search terms/key words entered into the search boxes in IE search field/Bing Toolbar
  2. We then collect the URLs that people click on after they see the search results.  Plain and simple. 

And it makes sense, right?  There’s no need to actually examine the result set that comes back from WHATEVER search engine is in use because, after all, all you need is what’s important to the user (i.e. what they clicked in the end), not the rest of the results.  And humans likely know what the ‘best selections” are from any returned list of search results regardless of where that list comes from – Ask.com, Baidu.com, Amazon.com, even BING.COM… so why not simply record the links they select, if, again, this is permitted by the user?

Here’s a list of links that explain this in more detail but the end result is the same:  Google just doesn’t get it.

* I believe the marketing name for the ‘opt-in’ option to share this data with Microsoft is known as the Customer Experience Improvement Program or the CEIP.  This is not on by default and is something the user manually enables to improve Microsoft products – including Bing.

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