[What's wrong with you guys? Really. The last couples of days have made me lose lots of respect for the half of YC's readers that so vehemently defends MSFT's actions.]
Now, to your point. Do you really think MSFT just designed a machine learning algo that just evolved to predict
>www.google.com/search?q=thisisafakequery> to <www.somepage.com>? Come on.. If I were the Bing Toolbar PM, I would spend half my manpower in making sure that I'm extracting Google's results.
And also, the big competitive issues you have from MSFT's abusing its dominance of the desktop (what's the HHI of the OS market again?) to compete in another area (dominance of abuse, as someone said: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167016 )
What you fail to understand is how search algorithms and machine learning works. Yes its no coincidence that Bing showed search results. Google pretty much gamed their algorithm so it would happen that way by providing false data for Bing to train on.
Really the only valid argument you've implied above is that it might be unethical to strip data using the Bing toolbar. But that's an entirely different point. I'm not saying Bing is being ethical. I'm just saying they aren't directly copying.
Maybe they are. How can we know?
Maybe they just scrap every google page, as a way to circumvent robots.txt. (5 years ago no one would have given msft the benefit of the doubt, b/c we've all seen their track record, funny how they are now perceived as the up-and-coming guy in the game)
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] threadNow, to your point. Do you really think MSFT just designed a machine learning algo that just evolved to predict >www.google.com/search?q=thisisafakequery> to <www.somepage.com>? Come on.. If I were the Bing Toolbar PM, I would spend half my manpower in making sure that I'm extracting Google's results.
And then, you have all the messy issues about who truly created the association between queries and results: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170832
And also, the big competitive issues you have from MSFT's abusing its dominance of the desktop (what's the HHI of the OS market again?) to compete in another area (dominance of abuse, as someone said: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167016 )
Really the only valid argument you've implied above is that it might be unethical to strip data using the Bing toolbar. But that's an entirely different point. I'm not saying Bing is being ethical. I'm just saying they aren't directly copying.