These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox.
A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.
They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.
Searching from the address bar, and changing the user's default search experience aren't the same thing.
If Microsoft was adding Bing as a search provider this wouldn't be nearly as controversial. Instead they're removing the user's preference and replacing it with their own, without consent, during a regular update of an unrelated product.
It is basically adware behaviour. Microsoft's self-rationalisation isn't relevant.
Interestingly, I've seen multiple non-tech persons with Bing as their default homepage (most of them having IE as browser) actually searching for "google" with Bing to search for what they wanted in the first place.
I guess it's likely that people do it the other way around.
That is exactly what's being claimed. The queries were not made on bing.com, they were made on google.com. The only way Bing can become aware of the results of these google.com queries is if they're "spying" on the user's activity via the Bing Toolbar and IE8 suggested search features.
"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above)."
>It's primarily to do with users not being cognisant that Bing is a search engine. For example, I set my friend [...] she types: "google supermarket opening times" and so on.
I'm not debating you because I don't have the raw usage data but I observe a different behavior with non-HN non-techie crowd: they deliberately want to go to the "google.com" home page to also navigate to Google's webapps like Gmail, Google Calendar, etc
The users have Google sign-ins and they don't know (or haven't memorized) direct urls like "gmail.com" or "calendar.google.com". What they do know is the colorful icons on Google's main page to click on to get to those apps. In these use cases, the Google landing page -- which has a search bar -- is also acting as a modern-day version of America Online's "portal to the internet". That's what I personally observe people typing "google" into Bing is trying to accomplish. Of course the prominent search field is still front-and-center so they'll naturally use Google Search because of familiarity. The search text field PLUS the Google web apps reinforce each other's continued usage habits.
People think the end users are the victim here. This equally applies if my default search engine is something else. Bing is still going to override it.
My question is... did Google install the Bing toolbar and then performing these searches on Google and click the links? If not, is Bing suggesting that users searched for those convoluted strings, in IE, with the Bing toolbar, on Google's website, and then clicked those links?
I hope this doesn't sound hyperbolic, that is really my understanding of the issue. Sorry, I'm not a big SEO guy, it's very possible my understanding or comprehension here is just flawed.
Excellent analysis, thank you, especially in the distinction between "suggested sites" and the Bing toolbar's behavior. I can't argue with your methods. However, I do differ with some of your conclusions:
> The behaviour I’ve seen explains Google’s experiments, but does not support the accusation that Bing set out to copy Google.
I don't think it's so much about "set out to copy Google" necessarily, as it is that they are explicitly parsing Google queries and results from the clickthrough data and using it (quite directly) for their own results. What they set out to do is immaterial given what is provably happening.
> Bing Toolbar is tracking user clicks and Bing could use the result to improve search results. I don’t personally see any great distinction between this behaviour and Google’s many tracking, indexing and scraping endeavours which they use to improve their own search results.
The difference is that Google has proven that the results of certain queries are being directly fed as Bing results. If Microsoft does the same with Google rankings, I'd see your point, but right now the evidence only points in one direction.
> While I personally dislike the privacy implications, Bing Toolbar is pretty upfront about it when it gets installed (unlike much web page user tracking.) The fact that the tracking is plain HTTP not HTTPS, with the content in plaintext, would seem to indicate that they weren’t seeking to hide anything.
I'd be interested to see if Google over HTTPS queries are being transmitted by the toolbar over HTTP. That would be a pretty serious privacy violation IMO, especially when you pair that with unencrypted wifi at Starbucks. See the AOL search log fiasco: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/aol-search-log.p...
I may be misunderstanding what is happening, but is it possible Bing is just doing what it was programmed to do- examining the user's browsing habits? Is it necessarily directly and purposely targeting Google?
It's primarily to do with users not being cognisant that Bing is a search engine.
For example, I set my friend's default search engine to Bing, and if she wants to find something, in her mind, she needs to "google it". So she types: "google supermarket opening times" and so on.
OK, out of curiosity I actually tried installing the Bing bar (on IE9 beta, which, btw, makes you manually activate add-ins after they're installed. The installer for the addin itself is pretty upfront about it sending your click data and stuff - it's right there on the one and only options page, next to one of three checkboxes - though the box is checked by default which I think is dubious).
I haven't been able to influence the Bing search results (no surprise there, since I've only spent a few minutes on it and not weeks like the Google folks) but one thing I did find very interesting was that if you search for something on another site, the Bing bar actually lights up and populates its own search field with your query so that with another click you can search for it on Bing.
As far as I can tell, the bar doesn't seem to be using any heuristic to tell what is a search query but just has a list of sites/URL patterns it knows about. Besides Google and Bing itself, these include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Ask.com, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MSDN and IMDB, but not Twitter or DuckDuckGo. This doesn't prove anything about how it's feeding search results of course but it does at least suggest that the Bing bar is very interested specifically in search queries, though not only on Google.
My mom has a Windows laptop which she uses without even really understanding what a web browser is, or what a search engine is. She uses Bing because that's what the Windows search bar defaults to and because the default web browser on Windows by default opens with MSN as its home page, and she doesn't understand she has a choice in any of this, and probably wouldn't bother to change anything even if she did understand and knew how to change it.
I strongly suspect that many Bing users are similarly borderline computer-illiterate, and just use Bing because it's the default.
The same probably goes for many Google users, a lot of whom were probably tricked by some software they installed that had a tiny checkmark and small print telling them it was going to install Chrome and make Google their home page.
Also, I have the impression that a few microsoft products (MSN, live etc) will automatically change other browser's search engine to Bing. My girlfriend told me her "google changed" after installing MSN.
But maybe it was something else, as she's doesn't exactly knows what she's doing. Can anyone confirm that?
"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results"
In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.
>In 2011, Google famously accused Microsoft’s Bing search engine of doing exactly that: logging Google search traffic in Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser in order to improve the quality of Bing results.
MS didn't do that from IE, they did for users who installed the Bing bar, a huge difference.
Sorry you're right. The other possibility is that bing is scraping the query term and all of the links out of the search page, and correlating them immediately. That means they're totally susceptible to google bombing (which is in effect what google did).
The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.
They're not alleging that Bing is using Google to execute their searches - they're alleging that they are using data harvested from Internet Explorer users when they use Google, in order to add Google results to Bing's index.
A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.
They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.
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