
Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it (2011) - ProfDreamer
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html
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partiallypro
If people are having to dig up 7 year old articles to bash Microsoft, I guess
they've improved a lot.

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beaner
Probably related to the other thread on HN today about a guy having his site
scraped by a competitor.

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Grue3
IIRC they literally installed a Bing toolbar and agreed to turn on a feature
that indexes all the sites that the user visits. To then blame Bing for
indexing their decoy page, when Google themselves gave permission to index it,
is absolutely laughable.

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Someguywhatever
This is 7 years old though, I would be curious to see if the experiment is
still repeatable today.

I've noticed personally that bing has gotten a lot better, but that could just
be because it's still a delayed version of Google.

Microsoft may even be using IE to harvest data to reverse engineer a Google
search algorithm. Even if they make an inferior verision thats 90% as good,
that's still good enough to keep them relevant in the market.

~~~
exikyut
Well, you could sort of do this experiment yourself, with a bit of preparation
and a decent bit of patience.

\- Prepare a new small website on an extremely obscure topic; something a
search engine will consider uninteresting and not worth ranking highly, but
just legitimate enough to warrant maintaining in the search index. On top of
obscurity, don't link to the site from anywhere. This is so the site doesn't
wind up crawled by Bing.

\- Manually add the site to Google's index (I forget where but there's a
webmaster tool that can be used to manually add things; then you wait and see
if the crawler paid any attention and added it to the index)

\- Add a single webpage on the site that, in amongst all the other words,
contains a single random word, or a series of random words. Now repeatedly
search Google for the term, on a machine nowhere near a Windows system, and
and wait see if your site shows up. It will take some time to get this
working, because unlike Google's fully contrived test, actually getting
garbage/nonsense words into the index does take effort, as (in my experience)
the index seems to be primed to index/prefer valid words over garbage; on top
of this, your nonsense word will be (if you're doing it right) the only result
in the world for the word, so it may be the search result is in the index but
has some attribute marking it below a "show in results" threshold, if such
metrics exist.

\- Now you have your magic term, do what Google did, and repeatedly search
Bing for the term, from IE.

\- ???

\- Profit?

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Someguywhatever
In the actual experiment Google Engineers manually inserted the data into
their index. IDK if my own activities would result in my fake site getting
indexed by them, also I don't know how to ensure that I am the ONLY result,
which was the case with the google test.

~~~
exikyut
I've googled tons of things that only get one single search result.

Obviously I can't link them here, since then there would be _two_ results...

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justinsaccount
So they..

* Inserted results into the search index for odd queries like "hiybbprqag"

* Searched Bing for those queries

* Saw the result from google

Wouldn't it have been easier and just as definitive to just

* Search Bing for hiybbprqag

* Show that google received a search query for the same thing

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RSZC
No, it's not that Bing was redirecting traffic through Google. Instead it was
that windows/IE8 was sending data on search terms/clicks on google from their
users' machines to Microsoft.

So user searches Google for a search term and then clicks on a result. This
data is then sent to Microsoft, and Bing is updated accordingly (and will
return that result for that search term) at a later point in time.

~~~
belltaco
>Instead it was that windows/IE8 was sending data on search terms/clicks on
google from their users' machines to Microsoft.

Only if they had Bing's IE search bar installed and enabled.

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dmix
Original thread on HN from 8yrs ago (511 upvotes):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167875)

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aogl
This is really bizarre that MS(Bing) can still claim that they don't use
Google results with such an investigation and fake results showing identically
in both places, having originated on the Google side. Come on Bing, just own
up!

~~~
dmix
Bing's excuse (at the time in 2011) was that it was the result of Internet
Explorer, Bing toolbar, and other user behaviour within their products which
seeded this data.

I'm curious if the Google engineers visited any of the 100 search terms using
IE or Microsoft service... but I doubt that. There had to be some level of
scraping. It's pretty embarrassing.

They also were using autocomplete terms that matched Google's perfectly, which
is what initially caught Google's attention.

~~~
notamy
> I'm curious if the Google engineers visited any of the 100 search terms
> using IE or Microsoft service... but I doubt that.

From the article:

>We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows
running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the
install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we
accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

> We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box
> on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we
> inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this
> experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an
> example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at
> a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the
> query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).

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O1111OOO
In essence, sounds like a bit of keylogging, data-sharing with external
site(s). From the article, even Google couldn't exactly figure what was going
on technically. Makes me wonder what else Microsoft was recording and sharing
at the time - or was it just limited to google.com.

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matt4077
I actually think Bing is ahead of Google for image search these days.

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randyrand
Bing and Google get their search results by scraping websites that other
people own. For bing, google is just one of the website they scrape.

So probably not illegal - though it definitely looks bad.

~~~
engrefoobiz
There's a difference in a search engine scraping a site just to link to that
site. And scraping a site to claim its content as your own.

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nickthemagicman
This is so typical Microsoft. Zune, Xbox, Bing, literally 90% of what they do
is a rip off of other innovators ideas.

