Google has officialy blamed Microsoft that it has been copying result-sets from Google's search engine, as an attempt to improve Bing's search capabilities. Microsoft has denied the accusations in a very peculiar manner. At times, boths sides appeared like angry tomcats growling at each other, or more accurately, like two teenagers flaming in some ancient usenet group. Seems like the majority of the blogosphere (at least that which I have time to read) seems to accept Google's version. And it is no wonder. Seems like Microsoft has written into the Bing Toolbar a very interesting algorithm. If a user reaches through any search engine, an interesting result set, with keywords Bing is not aware of, Bing Toolbar sends it home for analysis and addition to Bing's search database. As you can imagine, there has to be a rather dumb algorithm at home checking these result sets before adding them to the production search database of bing, or else, how could those funny traps google set in Bing's way have been taken in so easily ?
Three outcomes are -
1) One's respect for Microsoft's search engine group managers has to be reduced .
Not because of this ingenious technical imrovement. On the contrary there. It is an excellent way to improve one's search engine, and I'm not entirely sure it is a complete copycat act as each bit of information copied from google, is copied by a single private computer. It is more like each user, in his own free time, dedicated to the mission of improving bing, is registering there any search result he reached in google, that is still unknown to bing.
What is shocking here is the fact that it appears as if people at Microsoft didn't prepare for the day of discovery. Any person with his sound mind could have told them - "guys, this is a brilliant way to close the gap, quickly, and bring our search database up-to-mark with google in no time. But if word gets out, it won't look good. Lets prepare to the PR war upfront".
And yet, it seems, no one at Microsoft thought about it.
Not only were they caught with the hand in the cookie jar, but they had no plausible explanation, while any one with a little imagination could have offered dozens of explanation for this new data hunting method.
Worse than that - it seems like they didn't think Google might set this trap for them. Otherwise, they could have easily add an intertwining which verifies that search results are legitimate. It would have slowed bing's pace at closing the data gap, but would have made life so much harder for google in showing the world Microsoft's way of competing...
2) One's respect for Microsoft's competitiveness, at least at the search engines arena, is restored. They are willing to take some very nasty means, in order to stay in the game. Bill Gates might not be an active manager anymore, but his spirit of never give up and use what you can, is still there after years it appeared to have been forgotten.
3) The saddest of them all - seems like there is virtual pollution even by the search engines themselves, those angels of order in a world overfilled with data. All of a sudden, very meaningless strings have become legitimate search terms.
Three outcomes are -
1) One's respect for Microsoft's search engine group managers has to be reduced .
Not because of this ingenious technical imrovement. On the contrary there. It is an excellent way to improve one's search engine, and I'm not entirely sure it is a complete copycat act as each bit of information copied from google, is copied by a single private computer. It is more like each user, in his own free time, dedicated to the mission of improving bing, is registering there any search result he reached in google, that is still unknown to bing.
What is shocking here is the fact that it appears as if people at Microsoft didn't prepare for the day of discovery. Any person with his sound mind could have told them - "guys, this is a brilliant way to close the gap, quickly, and bring our search database up-to-mark with google in no time. But if word gets out, it won't look good. Lets prepare to the PR war upfront".
And yet, it seems, no one at Microsoft thought about it.
Not only were they caught with the hand in the cookie jar, but they had no plausible explanation, while any one with a little imagination could have offered dozens of explanation for this new data hunting method.
Worse than that - it seems like they didn't think Google might set this trap for them. Otherwise, they could have easily add an intertwining which verifies that search results are legitimate. It would have slowed bing's pace at closing the data gap, but would have made life so much harder for google in showing the world Microsoft's way of competing...
2) One's respect for Microsoft's competitiveness, at least at the search engines arena, is restored. They are willing to take some very nasty means, in order to stay in the game. Bill Gates might not be an active manager anymore, but his spirit of never give up and use what you can, is still there after years it appeared to have been forgotten.
3) The saddest of them all - seems like there is virtual pollution even by the search engines themselves, those angels of order in a world overfilled with data. All of a sudden, very meaningless strings have become legitimate search terms.
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