Freely sharing the data in the sphere where you're trying to catch up, while zealously guarding the data in the sphere where you've got a massive lead, is the alleged hypocrisy.
Hard-won bits is hard-won bits, at a suitably abstract level of analysis.
A search engine performs the task of narrowing 1 trillion URLs into the 10 that are most likely to be what you are looking for. Associating a query with those 10 results takes teams of software engineers and datacenters full of computers. A user could not reasonably do this on their own.
Contact data is a list of the people you know. I had that list in my brain before I ever visited Facebook. If I am on different social networking sites, that list is mostly the same, because it is information about me that I already knew. I didn't come to Facebook saying "hey Facebook, find for me the 10 people in the world who would be the best possible friends for me." Instead, I come to Facebook and start telling them the names of my friends.
But forget all that for a second. Imagine that contact data and search engines really were the same thing. Google does not access Facebook's social graph, because Facebook has not allowed them to. For Google's behavior to be like Microsoft's Google would have to work around that by using the "clickstream" of Chrome users who are on Facebook. Who knows, maybe Microsoft is doing this already, since they seem to think that "clickstream" is a valid way to mine the internal databases of other companies.
A search engine performs the task of narrowing 1 trillion URLs into the 10 that are most likely to be what you are looking for. Associating a query with those 10 results takes teams of software engineers and datacenters full of computers. A user could not reasonably do this on their own.
Quite irrelevant to the discussion here. A user could suggest specific pages be indexed by Bing, no? If so, why can't a user let Bing automatically listen in on the pages they are visiting and index them if Bing wishes to? That's what Bing did.
Contact data is a list of the people you know. I had that list in my brain before I ever visited Facebook. If I am on different social networking sites, that list is mostly the same, because it is information about me that I already knew.
Again, pretty irrelevant. If we are talking about data ownership, both your contacts data and your clickstream data belong to you. You can do what you want with it. Some users choose to share it with Bing. That's their prerogative. I don't think even Google disagrees with that.
They just don't see the hypocrisy between this and their stance on Facebook.
Google does not access Facebook's social graph, because Facebook has not allowed them to.
Correct, and yet, Google's stance in the Facebook episode has been that Facebook should open up that data because it does not belong them, it belongs to the users. To be consistent with their stance on Bing, Google should never have created a big fuss about Facebook not opening up the data.
Similarly, clickstream data does not belong to Google. It belongs to the users.
Even if absolutely everything you say is true, even if "clickstream data belongs to the users" and the users can "share" it with Microsoft, it's still the case that Microsoft is riding on the backs of Google's engineers.
And as I said in my original message, maybe that's even a smart business move. But let's call a spade a spade. Microsoft is copying Google search results.
Is that really what you want to be sticking up for?
This is the lie that you keep telling yourselves. Rationalize it however you want, but show a normal person the screenshots on this page and ask them if there is copying going on: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-bing/
Maybe you call it "clickstream," maybe you think this has something to do with the user (even though the users had no idea they were aiding in this), this web of rationalizations cannot get around this fact:
Bing puts things in its search index that came directly from Google's algorithm.
1. User searches for specific string
2. Google pulls up the results
3. User clicks on the result
Bing makes a corelation between the user's search string and the URL they end up on and takes a note of it. There is very little algorithm involved here because there is only one listing for that string. The algorithm is primarily used to rank pages. In order for Google to convince me that Bing is copying them, they would need to show a consistent before and after of Bing copying the search results and its order. Emphasis on resultS--in plural.
Neither are present in the Google honeypot. There is only one search result returned; and there is no question of the order of search results cuz of that. Two items central to the algorithm are entirely missing.
Going back to what Microsoft does copy:
1. it copies the user's input--imo this belongs to the user
2. it does not copy the order of search results nor scrape the returned search results returned by google
3. it copies the url the user ends up on, which is effectively a user's browsing history that the user has opted in to share with Bing.
