Did we read the same article? I like Google and crew more than Microsoft, but this was pretty clear to me:
> Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.
Beyond that, it's kind of crazy to think they'd open up on nitty-gritty details about their algorithm - nobody does that.
Anyways, I'm still with Google. I hope Google wins. But attacking Bing here was probably a tactical mistake - pretty much all marketing thought ever says "Don't attack-market against upstarts if you're the market leader!" You can't win if you're #1 and you do that. Google's #1. Attacking Bing was a really bad tactical move, though I'm still casually rooting for Google to win.
> Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.
Beyond that, it's kind of crazy to think they'd open up on nitty-gritty details about their algorithm - nobody does that.
Anyways, I'm still with Google. I hope Google wins. But attacking Bing here was probably a tactical mistake - pretty much all marketing thought ever says "Don't attack-market against upstarts if you're the market leader!" You can't win if you're #1 and you do that. Google's #1. Attacking Bing was a really bad tactical move, though I'm still casually rooting for Google to win.