> They use clickstream data from Bing toolbar users to improve their search results.
If that leads to Bing absorbing Google's results, and eg. suggesting spelling corrections they would have never figured out except that Google thought of them first, then they are indeed stealing results, whether they meant to or not, and need to stop.
George Harrison didn't mean to copy the song "He's So Fine" when he wrote his song "My Sweet Lord," but he lost the lawsuit anyway and had to pay damages. Whether you call it "clickstream" or "user behavior," Bing is incorporating an association that could only have come from Google, and Google's robots.txt makes it very clear that robots are not allowed to mine search results.
> But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.
As has been mentioned many times, Google does not take user behavior from the toolbar as a signal for ranking.
> If that leads to Bing absorbing Google's results, and eg. suggesting spelling corrections they would have never figured out except that Google thought of them first, then they are indeed stealing results, whether they meant to or not, and need to stop.
Even if that's indirect information? For example, the Bing toolbar doesn't really say (in Gargamel's American voice for effect), "Nyhaahaha! I see these google search results! I will steal!" No, rather it says, "Ahh, after the result of a query to this site, we then leave the site to go to this page. If that query and this destination page appear in aggregate, Bing should take notice."
When I first learned how the Bing toolbar did this, I had two reactions: "Oh, that's clever. It's like engaging your users to help you be a directed crawler. It's 'querytext', which is not unlike google's innovation, 'linktext'." and then "But I would still never install the Bing toolbar. Man, that thing is a sad clown show." Honestly, it's one of Bing's smarter ideas.
There is only so far pure crawling and statistical analysis can go; there simply isn't enough data there and everyone knows how to use that data to great effect. Every search engine is incorporating new realtime communications and user behavior streams into their search results. Google certainly does this, albeit without a toolbar. Bing simply has the entire Microsoft software stack to lobby for help, so if someone opts into the Bing toolbar, they can opt into submitting additional information to improving the Bing index.
I'm not a big fan of MS or Bing, but in this they are only culpable for being clever. They are using querytext to improve relevance. I'm told you could make the same stunt work from a Wikipedia search box, leading to a wikipedia page.
If that leads to Bing absorbing Google's results, and eg. suggesting spelling corrections they would have never figured out except that Google thought of them first, then they are indeed stealing results, whether they meant to or not, and need to stop.
George Harrison didn't mean to copy the song "He's So Fine" when he wrote his song "My Sweet Lord," but he lost the lawsuit anyway and had to pay damages. Whether you call it "clickstream" or "user behavior," Bing is incorporating an association that could only have come from Google, and Google's robots.txt makes it very clear that robots are not allowed to mine search results.
> But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.
As has been mentioned many times, Google does not take user behavior from the toolbar as a signal for ranking.