Comments on: Google Accuses Bing of Cheating: Proofs Toolbar Data For Ranking Works

By: Ruud Hein

Ruud Hein — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:00:03 +0000

In reply to Thos003.

I’m not even sure it shows that. If for a virtually non-existent query (sent to Bing, as they disclose) a user spends a certain amount of time on a page resulting from that query (URL of which is sent to Bing, as they disclose) and you repeat that a few times, you could trigger a filter that starts to promote that page for that query — without scraping anything.

It’s like when you repeat a unique word or phrase many times on a page, do a search and once that page “ranks” #1 out of 3 results returned claiming keyword density is something real.

With very small datasets you get inconclusive results unless you cross-reference like crazy. It’s the reason why long tail spam works: unique queries with a small result set play with a different set of rules (filters) than larger sets.

By: Thos003

Thos003 — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:45:20 +0000

“small a data set… tests can show some pretty wild and exciting stuff that never ever translates into the real world”

So what did Google really prove? That Bing’s toolbar scraps Google for content? Hmmm… Isn’t imitation the greatest form of flattery?

By: Tanner

Tanner — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:45:55 +0000

When you think about it, there’s probably a very large percentage of smaller search engines out there that simply feed off of Google’s results (and index Google’s pages themselves). Bing is just following the conga line.