

How Google Ambushed Microsoft and Changed the Subject - HardyLeung
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/03/how-google-ambushed-microsoft-and-changed-the-subject

======
brudgers
> _"I can’t condone any kind of plagiarism or cheating—and that is what
> Microsoft’s usage of Google data seems to amount to."_

By academic standards, Google plagiarizes many times a day.

In Google's "sting" operation the description Google provides for
www.cfacu.org is copied directly from DMOZ. Academic standards don't cut any
slack for the ODP license and similar terms.

See:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-
uses-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-
search.html)

and

<http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=clyde+findley+area+credit+union>

~~~
maeon3
The best argument Microsoft has is: "You Too". Basically: "What I did wasn't
wrong because the person complaining does it too."

~~~
brudgers
My comment was not a defense of Bing but an attempt to point out the absurdity
of applying academic standards Microsoft's conduct. Were one to apply academic
standards to Binggate, it seems somewhat probable that Google's experimental
results would have difficulty passing peer review.

Interestingly from a plagiarism standpoint, the description returned by Bing
for cfacu.org is far better cited, since it is directly from the website
itself rather than from an entirely uncited site like Google's.

In terms of academic standards, the results returned by Bing would probably
not to be categorized as plagiarism but rather as not meeting style guidelines
[such as APA format].

------
eitally
Most of Wadhwa's essays just get a "meh" from me. Nothing particularly
original, not always pointed, and they usually don't leave me fulfilled.
Perhaps this one may have been useful if the reader had been living under a
rock for the last week, but those people don't frequent tech blogs.

------
jefe78
If Blekko sticks to their word, I'd be inclined to give them a real chance.
Sick of my search results being padded with spammy results.

EDIT: Having looked at them, I'm a little unclear about what they're trying to
do. Are they actually letting end-users tag the web? I.e., Google not allowing
users to block certain sources.

~~~
greglindahl
Yes, we're letting end-users tag the web. Try this video:
<http://vimeo.com/14593120> ... for the spam example, you can mark a site as
spam with a single click. That blocks it only for you, but occasionally we
look at aggregate data, and that's why we dropped those 20 sites from our
index: because our users don't want to see them.

~~~
jefe78
That is great to hear! I'm going to put it through its paces! I'd love to
share feedback with you once I do.

------
narrator
>"We need a standard measure of web quality. "

To think that you can come up for an objective standard of quality for any
search term is ridiculous. Why not just have a search engine return whatever
your objective standard demands everytime and have a perfect score, if it's so
easy?

~~~
extension
A metric that can measure the quality of results but not produce them is
entirely plausible. Many problems can be verified much more easily than they
are solved.

For example, you can measure how often results are clicked but there is no
straightforward algorithm to generate click-prone results.

------
recoiledsnake
Many articles on TechCrunch seem to be the gossipy type and are not much
better than articles in a content farm that the author is railing on.

~~~
jacques_chester
Humans like to gossip. That's why almost all reporting is boiled down to
variations on horse race calling and theatre critique.

