Intellectual Property and Web Services

[Dreadnaught]

In another thread I brought up a recent feces-throwing fest between Google and Bing. Here's the issue in a nutshell from the Mossad agents at the BBC-

Google accuses Bing of 'copying' its search results


Google has accused Microsoft of cheating, following an investigation known as the 'Bing Sting'.

Google engineers created 100 nonsensical queries such as "hiybbprqag" and inserted a fake result for each.

Within weeks, the same results began to appear on its rival Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Microsoft denies copying Google and accused Google of conducting "spy-novelesque stunts".

Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: "We do not copy Google's search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results," he added.

"Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites," he added.

Cheap imitation

But Google's Amit Singhal told industry blog SearchEngineLand.com that it was "plain and simply cheating" and he detailed the sting operation in a long blog post.

He said Google decided to conduct its experiment after mis-spelt words and results were replicated on Bing.

"A search for 'hiybbprqug' on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google's result page," he said.

"We noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency," he went on.

He concluded that Microsoft was gathering data on what people search for on Google, via either Internet Explorer or the Bing Search toolbar.

"Some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results - a cheap imitation," he said.

Search voice
Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert, has mixed feelings about what the experiment shows.

"On the one hand you could say it's incredibly clever. Why not mine what people are selecting as the top results on Google as a signal?" he wrote on his blog.

But he also said he had sympathy for Google's view that Bing is doing something wrong.

"Every search engine has its own 'search voice', a unique set of search results that it provides, based on its collection of documents and its own particular method of ranking those.

I think Bing should develop its own search voice without using Google's as a tuning fork," he added.

Wider issues for him include how Google went about setting up its honeypot trap to ensnare Bing and whether it was just a "clever way to distract from current discussions about its search quality".

Google has stressed that it has now removed the one-time code that it added to plant the fake pages.

Had any of its fake queries proved popular, it said that it would have removed the page they linked to.

Mr Sullivan also questioned how much consumers knew about the data capture that allowed Microsoft to gather Google's search results, either via Internet Explorer or the Bing toolbar.

"Do Internet Explorer users know that they might be helping Bing in the way Google alleges? Technically, yes. Explicitly, absolutely not," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12343597

A much more detailed explanation is here: http://searchengineland.com/google-b...-results-62914 <-- Highly recommend reading if you're going to discuss the technicals of this.

Google blogged about it here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/...le-search.html

***

Ominous Gamer seemed to suggest that the "sting" Google ran to catch Bing was somehow "evil". I find this accusation rather odd and await his explanation.

But more generally, this brought up a question of how we value intellectual property on the Web. Is it wrong for Web services to aggregate how people use rival Web services to substantially improve their competing service? Does this amount to intellectual theft?

If it doesn't amount to intellectual theft, what is theft when it comes to competing Web-based services?

After all, on one side we seem to be facing patent-trolls who patent basic concepts like mouse clicks. But on the other side we have de-facto content farms that make a profit off the on-the-ground work of news reporters.

[Ominous Gamer]

talk about jumping to conclusions when you missed the point.
The "evil" was in how Microsoft was copying Google, not because Google set a trap Microsoft fell for less than 1/10th of the time

Its not intellectual theft. This was covered years ago when phone books (and maps) started sueing each other over copying records. Nothing creative is being stolen, only facts, and you can't own those.
The concept of stealing search results isn't new either, its the whole concept behind sites like dogpile. This time, it just happens to be Bing.

Reddit has an ongoing discussion on this as well, thats what I was following when I posted this to the WTF thread before the mainstream picked it up, because it was to slimy and lowballish for me to think it was real at first. Especially considering Bing's current advertising push.


Microsoft has replied to this claim, a couple of times in fact
the difference between "copying" and "listening to users."
"We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,"

[agamemnus]

Bing is not copying google search results, at least verbatim.

I just ran the Google search on my "secret" in-development game, and a Bing search on the same keyword(s).The Google search result did not even have my super-secret website as far as I could tell, but for the Bing result, it was #1.

[Dreadnaught]

talk about jumping to conclusions when you missed the point.
The "evil" was in how Microsoft was copying Google, not because Google set a trap Microsoft fell for less than 1/10th of the time

Its not intellectual theft. This was covered years ago when phone books (and maps) started sueing each other over copying records. Nothing creative is being stolen, only facts, and you can't own those.
The concept of stealing search results isn't new either, its the whole concept behind sites like dogpile. This time, it just happens to be Bing.

Reddit has an ongoing discussion on this as well, thats what I was following when I posted this to the WTF thread before the mainstream picked it up, because it was to slimy and lowballish for me to think it was real at first. Especially considering Bing's current advertising push.


Microsoft has replied to this claim, a couple of times in fact
the difference between "copying" and "listening to users."
"We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,"

Ah, based on both of the references I thought you were saying the sting itself was somehow evil.

The thing with the phonebooks comparison is that the phonebooks were mostly just listing public data in alphabetical order. There was no significant or proprietary methodology behind how those numbers were ranked, displayed, etc. Search engines (and the data they parse) are much more complicated. Google and Bing both admit that there are hundreds of variables at play. And both spend significant amounts of money developing new ranking methodology (albeit Microsoft at a loss).

I've seen Microsoft's responses, they start to convince me that this is essentially a legitimate user signal until I go back to those screenshots of the gibberish "honeypot" results.

Bing is not copying google search results, at least verbatim.

I just ran the Google search on my "secret" in-development game, and a Bing search on the same keyword(s).The Google search result did not even have my super-secret website as far as I could tell, but for the Bing result, it was #1.

You didn't read it, did you?

[agamemnus]

Of course I read it... at least the part you quoted.

Edit: read most of the whole thing, but my comment stands, sir!

Edit: found this link from the article. I believe this also. And this was the case 3-4 years ago, too... it was just technical, hard-to-find stuff that was affected.
http://www.marco.org/2617546197

Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked. Google’s general, big-picture algorithms probably haven’t changed much since the days when this was relatively accurate.

But that’s no longer what web content looks like. Now, massive amounts of technically-not-spam sites are generated by penny-hungry affiliate marketers and sleazy web “content” startups to target long-tail Google queries en masse, scraping content from others or paying low-wage workers to churn out formulaic, minimally nutritious pages to answer them.

Edit:
Link from a link:

Mark Moran · 59 weeks ago
At Dulcinea Media, we've been developing products for three years to address the precise issues you raise. If you think Google is bad for "dishwashers," try it for an academic topic such as "Shakespeare" or "War of 1812." There, you get sites that appear wholly legit, but are not created by authorities on those subjects. Dulcinea Media offers a Google-powered custom search engine, SweetSearch (www.SweetSearch.com) that searches only a white-list of 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by our team of two dozen Internet research experts. The spam sites you despise are nowhere to be found, and the best results float to the top. Here's the result for "dishwashers:" http://www.sweetsearch.com/search.html?q=dishwashers

[Ominous Gamer]

The thing with the phonebooks comparison is that the phonebooks were mostly just listing public data in alphabetical order. There was no significant or proprietary methodology behind how those numbers were ranked, displayed, etc. Search engines (and the data they parse) are much more complicated. Google and Bing both admit that there are hundreds of variables at play. And both spend significant amounts of money developing new ranking methodology (albeit Microsoft at a loss).

Phonebooks and map makers have both in the past included easter eggs and gibberish results in order to humiliate their opponents. The phonebook lawsuits lost, for reasons I already said. The methodology doesn't matter. Its simply outside information.
Again, this isn't new, using the search results of other search engine is the point behind metasearch engines.

The only "news" here is that its Bing doing the copying, a company thats supposed to be good enough, large enough, smart enough, to not have to use such tactics.
Plus the fact that Microsoft watches their users so closely that the search habits only a hand full of users are able to alter search results.

Some even question if Google isn't being hypocritical.

[Dreadnaught]

I just can't agree that a phone book is similar to a search engine. Phone books are lists of already-structured data. Search engines are basically the wholesale creation of structured data sets.

It's complex enough that we've been having silly debates about "search neutrality" and the cultural implications of how search engines (and now social networks) impact how we access information.

Though that Yahoo article was pitched by Consumer Watchdog, which is a Microsoft-funded anti-Google group. But in a roundabout way, their point is also a point I'm thinking about with this. If a Web service provides an elegant way to process or edit information, is there any valid consumer-friendly way to enforce intellectual property? For example, is Google Docs basically a clone of the features and UI experiments done for MSWord, WordPerfect, etc. in the previous decade? Or is the backbone of the service new enough to merit considering it a whole new product?

Ag- the debate over search spam is different, and something that's been actively discussed by several in the media (and Google) as recently as last week.

[Ominous Gamer]

I just can't agree that a phone book is similar to a search engine. Phone books are lists of already-structured data. Search engines are basically the wholesale creation of structured data sets.

Perhaps you can find the connection between this definition and the failed Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act
Oh, and Google was againist it.

[Dreadnaught]

I don't quite see a strong connection. I mean, a method of ranking an index is different than actually collecting that index.

[Ominous Gamer]

You're going to make this so wide, that you're accusing Microsoft of stealing Google's method of ranking?

[Dreadnaught]

They aren't stealing their ranking method.

[Ominous Gamer]

They are copying Google's single top result less than 10% of the time. That hardly sounds like a ranking method. They are doing it by monitoring what their users are clicking on. They are using the behavior of their own, willing, customers, to modify Bing results. I highly doubt its limited to just Google results either.

[Ominous Gamer]

Google's copying accusation called 'silly'

it would be impossible for Microsoft to use the copied results to reverse engineer Google's search algorithms. And in fact it is more likely that Microsoft was conducting competitive research. Charlene Li, founder of technology research and advisory firm Altimeter Group, saw Google's actions as a misguided response to a real threat from a competitor in its core search business. 'Google isn't used to having competition. You look at this incident and you wonder why they are doing this. It feels amateurish in a way, a kind of 'they're not playing fair' attitude,' she said."

[Dreadnaught]

You just went from calling this "evil" to defending them.

[Ominous Gamer]

I'm defending it from being considered illegal. It can still be evil by:

its Bing doing the copying, a company thats supposed to be good enough, large enough, smart enough, to not have to use such tactics.
Plus the fact that Microsoft watches their users so closely that the search habits only a hand full of users are able to alter search results.

you've missed that point twice now.

[Dreadnaught]

I haven't missed anything at all, I never said it was illegal. I was questioning the ethics of it and whether we could ever make laws around the kind of intellectual property that goes into making a search algorithm.

You just need to be clear. FFS.

[Ominous Gamer]

Does this amount to intellectual theft?

If it doesn't amount to intellectual theft, what is theft when it comes to competing Web-based services?

I never said it was illegal.

I'm defending it from being considered illegal.

sorry, you must not have made yourself clear
If you're not questioning if/how this is illegal, you're questioning how/if to make it so. Thats the position I'm againist, because thats not even remotely whats happening here.

[Dreadnaught]

I should have anticipated this. You think it's "evil", but you also don't believe in intellectual property due to the "OG likes free stuff" doctrine.

[Ominous Gamer]

I think its evil how Microsoft is gathering its data, and how its doing this while running its ad campaign of better search. The first result (that Microsoft is only discovering and recording through the preferences of its users), is hardly a search algorithm, ranking method (since it would likely work if the users all clicked the 5th or 19th result), or intellectual property, thus your position doesn't have anything to do with whats happening here and you have no grounds to try and move this into a attack OG defense (besides wanting to act like a dick).

To break this down a little better:
Microsoft is monitoring its bing toolbar users.
When those users type something, then click something, bing uses that information when building its search rankings.

If a set of multiple users repeatedly searched for the same term, and clicked on the same link, and that term and link have no other associations or search term competitors, that link is going to end up at the top of a none existant list of search results.
Because, and you may want to sit down for this, that is how a fucking search engine works. Hell, even Anon understands this, they game google trends all the fucking time.