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A comment on Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models. Parent comment

Re:Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models by mike_hearn on Friday June 26, 2026 @07:04AM (#48685181)
You actually can "distill" web search. At one point Google accused Microsoft of doing this by monitoring clicks in IE to train Bing with Google click logs for better ranking. They discovered it by creating fake result pages with nonsensical queries and discovering the same results appeared in Bing a few weeks later.

https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...

They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.

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Re:Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models by areoform on Friday June 26, 2026 @07:04PM (#48693141)
Wouldn't that have required an insane amount of infrastructure? Infrastructure that they could have used to crawl... anything else?

    They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.
That's very funny.

How many billions did they spend doing this? And they still haven't caught up.

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Re:Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models by mike_hearn on Saturday June 27, 2026 @09:15AM (#48698008)
No, just control over web browsers which they had back then.
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