News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by exikyut on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @12:07PM (#17810841)
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?

Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by Someguywhatever on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @01:00PM (#17811413)
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.
Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by exikyut on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @08:06PM (#17814994)
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...

Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by belltaco on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @12:12PM (#17810891)
That experiment would have always failed. Check my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810832
Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by exikyut on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @12:16PM (#17810931)
Once the test site was successfully added to Google's index and the single webpage, and the nonsense term returned results for the test webpage, a toolbar-to-Google search from IE would just send the keyword off to Google, the search result would come back (from Google), and...

Or I'm completely missing something. This is possible.

Re:Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results–and denies it... by belltaco on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:48AM (#17816386)
>Now you have your magic term, do what Google did, and repeatedly search Bing for the term, from IE

That's not enough. You have to install the Bing toolbar on IE, and then consent to turn on the Suggested Sites feature.