

Really Google? Grow up and Quit Acting Like a 3 Year Old - jchonphoenix
http://jonchu.posterous.com/really-google-grow-up-and-quit-acting-like-a

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zzleeper
[What's wrong with you guys? Really. The last couples of days have made me
lose lots of respect for the half of YC's readers that so vehemently defends
MSFT's actions.]

Now, to your point. Do you really think MSFT just designed a machine learning
algo that just evolved to predict >www.google.com/search?q=thisisafakequery>
to <www.somepage.com>? Come on.. If I were the Bing Toolbar PM, I would spend
half my manpower in making sure that I'm extracting Google's results.

And then, you have all the messy issues about who truly created the
association between queries and results:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170832>

And also, the _big_ competitive issues you have from MSFT's abusing its
dominance of the desktop (what's the HHI of the OS market again?) to compete
in another area (dominance of abuse, as someone said:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167016> )

~~~
jchonphoenix
What you fail to understand is how search algorithms and machine learning
works. Yes its no coincidence that Bing showed search results. Google pretty
much gamed their algorithm so it would happen that way by providing false data
for Bing to train on.

Really the only valid argument you've implied above is that it might be
unethical to strip data using the Bing toolbar. But that's an entirely
different point. I'm not saying Bing is being ethical. I'm just saying they
aren't directly copying.

~~~
zzleeper
Maybe they are. How can we know? Maybe they just scrap every google page, as a
way to circumvent robots.txt. (5 years ago no one would have given msft the
benefit of the doubt, b/c we've all seen their track record, funny how they
are now perceived as the up-and-coming guy in the game)

