Microsoft, and any other would-be competitor, would essentially be committing suicide not to try to make up this data gap. If their toolbar is opt-in on the part of users, and you agree with me that my click history is mine to share with Microsoft if I so choose, this is helping consumers. Without some of this data, building a viable competitor to Google is impossible, and consumers do benefit from competition in web search.
Disclaimer: I work in Facebook search. Not the same thing as web search, and I don't really care whether Bing or Google "wins", though I'm temporarily rooting for Bing because as a user I want better, more competitive web search.
How about Yahoo ? They have a longer history I suppose. IMO it's all about quality and engineering.
More importantly why did Google survived and flourished for 12 years ?
But now Google doesnt really need ( Possibly then dont even use it) because of two set of queries where first user mispells and second where he corrects, gives them a StringMap that they can use to map mispelled queries to correct queries.
Google only gets the query volume it does because it is the quality leader. The query volume itself helps Google to retain its quality lead. Google likes to portray search quality as being algorithm-driven, and it is to some extent, but in the modern era quality is also about collaborative filtering with clicks. If you don't have the users, you don't see the clicks, and you can't have the quality. Web search is a natural winner-take-all monopoly, unless someone gets creative, which is what Microsoft seems to have done.
Don't Google, Facebook, et al run a lot of experiments for new projects on a subset of users/queries that's far smaller than 1% of traffic, and still yields very useful results?
1. User mistakenly types a query [mazad], meaning [mazda]. (Probably less than 1% of total queries for Mazda, which is an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the total queries in your system.)
2. The user gets garbage results, and the user realizes their mistake and fixes it, rather than giving up in frustration. This is probably rather rare too, though
3. The user clicks through something that ranked highly for Mazda, and stays there long enough that your system thinks it is a "long click" that probably satisfied the user.
The golden datum here is literally a one in very-many-thousands-of-sessions event, and you need to catch a statistically meaningful number of them for every misspelling (or synonym, or whatever you're trying to learn from this data) you'd like to have your system learn. To have good coverage of the English language, we're talking about many billions of search sessions.
A previous commenter pointed out that Yahoo! probably has enough data; I bet they're right. I don't know if Yahoo! and Bing's technology partnership included access to such data.
collaborative filtering with clicks ... you don't see the clicks,
and you can't have the quality
This is so typical of Microsoft btw.
They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade).
I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win.
ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization....
ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
How would you explain Xerox suing Apple over this?
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xero...
I can't find a mention of Apple licensing anything in the wikipedia article either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
Also this claims to debunk the story: http://books.google.pl/books?id=gzAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA3&...
"Xerox did at one time owne stock in Apple, they were purchased as an investment"
(All this followed from the Wikipedia page, I'll admit)
What is Google made up of? The then MSFTs are now at Google.
There are no non-Google page of links. The only association between these terms and the page exists on Google.
FTA:
>To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose -- the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query.
Note also that the example search links in the blog post are all from the non-SSL Google search. User tracking doesn't necessarily rely on the HTTP REFERER in this case, since the browser already has access to all of the necessary information. But it would still be interesting to see the experiment repeated using the SSL-encrypted Google search, which disables referrer information, along with non-Google sources.
If it's the first case, then that's a pretty cowardly way to act. If it's the latter, then you should just be ashamed of yourself in general.
Calling names is not OK. I'm pretty shocked you got any up-votes for your comment at all, and I'm ashamed of everyone on the site who gave you the bump.
EDIT: AT time of posting this comment, he had +8. My faith has been restored in the HN community.
Eh? Then why did it happen only in 6% or 7% of the cases tested and not close to 100%, a fact that the blog conveniently glosses over?
In discussions of this, I'm always surprised that people forget that Microsoft has had the axe of anti-trust litigation looming over it's head for years. They haven't been able to compete aggressively on a number of fronts, because they could easily be seen as anti-competitive, and end back in the courts.
But, now, search is a market where they are clearly the underdog. And, Microsoft finally has an arena they can step into and fight bare bloody knuckled without arousing anti-trust eyebrows in the US or EU governments.
And, Bing is competing rather well. Bing launched 18 months ago, and they now have 30% of the total search market (Yes, the bought a good bit of that through Yahoo). And, they are finally presenting a viable competitor to Google in general web search, which I believe is good for all.
Not only that, but in a number of search verticals, IMHO Bing's technology is quite a bit better than Google's (image search, video search and travel search).
I think Google has a reason to be scared and start throwing punches. Microsoft has a much more diverse revenue stream, and they can afford to lose money on search for years without breaking a sweat. Google primarily has a single source of revenue: search advertising. It'll be interesting to see how Google reacts when it's back is against the wall fighting for it's only revenue stream.
I agree with the OP. This is going to be a fun fight to watch.
Also, as stated on the earlier HN thread on this topic, it isn't at all clear that Google will come out on top. Many users suggested that the Google toolbar collected data on the sites people visited and if the Bing toolbar does also -- well is that really a game Google wants to play? Bing could come out a net winner given the increased attention on their search engine.
Why does this last aspect matter? It is an acknowledgment that Google is taking their competition seriously, which indicates a bit of uncertainty with respect to their own product. The more that goes into this (esp. if Bing hits back w/ info on how Google historically has mined data with their own toolbar) the more that Google has to lose and Microsoft has to win.
I do buy that argument but only for mass media PR type stuff. The market leader can only give attention and raise awareness to the followers.
The thing is in this case, it's a technical blog posting and really anyone following that already knows about Bing. It was in searchengineland. If they had a link to it on their home page it would be a different story.
The result of all this is that I now perceive Bing to be considered more of a contender by Google than I previously did.
I doubt that is what Google intended. But then, this PR move was probably meant to change the opinion of people who had a higher opinion of Microsoft and Bing than myself, or were just casual users with no real position.
Either way, it does put Microsoft on the defense for something that I wouldn't construe as malicious.
But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally.
As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.