Let’s take that thought to its conclusion. If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?
My take on this is quite the opposite. If MS thinks they're doing nothing wrong, they shouldn't stop. They should do what is best for their customers.
Reversing what they do now because Google "caught" them, would IMO, imply they were doing something wrong and got caught.
I personally think what Bing is doing is great. I regularly use Bing and Google. I wish there were a streamlined way for me to broadcast to both of them... "for search term X this is the relevant link!"
MS has found a way to do this, and as long as its opt-in, I like it. I wish Google had the same (although I do realize that since Google owns so much of the traffic it is less of an issue for them -- its a net loss in terms of the flow of information).
But maybe a question for Matt... Can you and MS work together for a toolbar that does just this for both engines?
As a user this isn't a matter of Bing copying Google or not. But its about the fact that search relevance still kind of sucks. I feel like I can make the search experience better, especially in those occassions when I go to your competitors site.
I wonder if you would be ok if Bing did the same thing to amazon. That is, imagine they used toolbar/IE logs to infer that people went to amazon, searched for LCD TVs and then purchased model X. Then they could boost pages about X in search, or implement a "bestselling" feature. After all, they are "just" using clickstream data here. Similarly, they could track Netflix, and so on.
IMHO, there's a loophole in Bing's argument that the user click data is free for them to use. What about the site - do they have no ability to consent/dissent to being tracked?
Maybe robots.txt needs to be updated for the toolbar.
Absolutely on all of those sites. And Wikipedia. Why would I not want them to? The only reason I could think of that I would not want them to is if I thought it would create worse search links as a result.
Although being able to personallize the search queries would be incredible. So when I search for "Movie XYZ" -- it can also look at my clickstream and see that I spend a lot of time in Netflix and Netflix has that movie, and they can point me to that movie directly in my search results ("You can stream Movie XYZ now!") -- kind of like a built in Clicker -- I'd love it.
But the problem is search relevance sucks. I'm in my freakin web browser all day, yet it contributes nothing to my search relevance. WTF!?
But again, key to me is opt-in. If anything, the one takeaway I would take if I were MS is to make it more apparent. But besides that. Everything you said, and more, please. And from Google too -- Bing shouldn't be the only one to benefit.
I'm not talking about using just visits to improve search though, I'm talking about using the pattern of interaction on a site to basically replicate a site's data. That is, imagine netflix recommends movie X to you, now Bing infers that Netflix has done so using custom code to parse their IE logs, and then recommend movie X to you.
"Stefan Weitz, director of the Bing search engine at Microsoft, said in an interview the company studies how certain users interact with Google in order to improve Bing. ..."
I'm not sure I get your example (not clear when Bing would recommend a movie to me). So let me give that I do understand.
I go to Netflix and search for the move "Network". I end up clicking on "The Social Network". Later on Bing, if I search for "movie Network" -- I'd hope that one of the movies that comes back is "The Social Network", based on that clickthrough data from Netflix..
In my mind the only thing that is borderline unethical is that we've artificially limited this clickstream data to one company. I'd like to give it out more broadly. It's my data right?
I was considering the case when you go to NetFlix, and they recomment the movie "Social Network" to you, and you click on it. Surely the url will have sufficient info to claim that its a recommendation.
Now bing implements a movie recommendation service, which also magically recommends for you "Social Network", based on clicktracking of Netflix.
IMHO, what Bing is doing with Google is exactly the same scenario as above (extract click data from a competitor's service, and surface the exact same data in their own product).
Why wouldn't I want Bing to recommend the movie? The first thing Bing should do is use Netflix's APIs to suck down all of my ratings of movies. Then it should use my clickstream data for Netflix, IMDB, Hulu, Amazon, Facebook etc... And if I'm using Media Center or SageTV, I want those things to also get consolidated together.
Are you saying you want your Netflix data in one silo, your Hulu data elsewhere, your TV data elsewhere? Don't get me wrong, I want this to all be opt-in, but when I opt-in on MY behavior, I want them to use it.
I would argue that users own their clickstream data and are free to give it away. (The question then becomes whether Microsoft makes sufficiently clear exactly which data users are giving to them.) Clickstream data is basically a list of URLs, I don’t think (parts of) such lists should controlled by website owners.
I’m not sure, though, whether I have overseen something that would make it useful or fair to give website owners control over clickstream data. I’m honestly open for suggestions.
But that’s only part of the problem. Even if everyone were to agree that collecting clickstream data from users with their consent is ok, we still don’t know how those who collect the data are allowed to use it. That’s certainly not an easy question.
You're right. There seems to be a gray area around whom owns the "click data":
- "Are users entitled to give away for free their navigation history ?"
- "To what extend are search engines allowed to implement specificities based on that data ?"
What is being data mined is a bit more than a user broadcasting their own preference on the correct result. The user is broadcasting a URL which is selected based on two factors:
- the user's preference
- Google's ranking algorithm.
Had Google not ranked that URL, the user wouldn't be broadcasting it. If there was some way to extract the factor of the user's preference of URLs as a signal without the factor of Google's ranking algorithm, you would be more spot on. Unfortunately this isn't possible. Also, in most cases the ranking algorithm component of this broadcasted data is the more useful factor of the two.
Yup this is the issue Google wants to raise. Expect Google lobbying soon for some law along the lines of "clicks on somesite.com belong to somesite.com and can only be shared with another party with somesite.com's permission.". Then in some Google ToS the "user" will be granted access to the clicks that the user makes on Google's search results page... but third party apps like Bing toolbar won't have access.
Perhaps :-) Google is a very smart, calculating company. They wouldn't dedicate so many resources to tricking the Bing toolbar if they weren't interested in getting something in return. Perhaps what Google wants in return is avoiding the following scenario: MS bundles the Bing toolbar with IE and data sharing is default opt-in. MS gets a ton of clickstream data from people using Google. Bing takes some of Google's marketshare.
Is Google's ranking algorithm somehow more sacred than my HTML? Google mines that to create their page rankings. Sure there's robots.txt but likewise Google could opt out of serving information to Internet Explorer since that's the only browser which has Bing toolbar. The entire search engine industry is based on using whatever someone has failed to opt out of.
I agree with you. Particularly, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this seems like a very biased suggestion.
All of the negative perception seems to come from Google deliberately inserting outlier data. For MS to back down on that basis immediately makes them look like they were doing much more than what is proven.
Best for their customers in what time frame? They might get better results in the short term, but it's much less clear what the long term effects are.
What if it slows down innovation in search quality and moves effort into marketing, shiny baubles? After all, why bother spending resources on researching, implementing and evaluating the algorithms when your competitors will within a couple of months gain the most of the improvements, automatically with no effort.
You complain about search relevance sucking. Why are you so eager to support a practice that has a high chance of causing it to stagnate?
> My take on this is quite the opposite. If MS thinks they're doing nothing wrong, they shouldn't stop. They should do what is best for their customers.
Does this mean anyone should feel free to ignore robots.txt if they think it will be better for their customers?
"Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar."
It is not clear to me that the user completely owns the clickstream. If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?
I guess if it really comes down to it Google can encrypt the query in the URL. If Microsoft circumvents this (like by intercepting the JavaScript that encrypts it, or pulling the query out of the HTML input element), then it will demonstrate that they're really intentionally copying Google's results and this "clickstream" business was just a convenient cover.
IF Google say you cannot share their data with anyone else, then you are not legally allowed to share the answer with your Dad.
IF Google say you must send a 'thank you' email to them after each query, you are legally obliged to do that.
IF Google say you cannot share their data in an automatic, 'clickstream' fashion, then you cannot legally use Microsoft's toolbar. And if you break that agreement, Microsoft cannot legally use the clickstream data you send it.
I think Google would require a clickthrough TOS to enforce this. AFAIK Google has no TOS listed on its page, but they do have a copyright notice. And a link would not be sufficient.
But yes, if they did a clickthrough TOS then they could enforce that. Of course the day Google adds a clickthrough TOS there will be some serious scrutinizing.
Doesn't the browser own the click even before the Web page gets it?
If Google's terms of use want to claim that a browser can't record clicks on their web pages, then perhaps browser terms of use will say they can do whatever they want with any data returned to them by the server.
Agreed. And his example of how his mom could not understand what the IE disclosure really meant in terms of information sharing is silly. Your typical mom would also does not understand the true extent of data collection from using Google's own products. Does that make it wrong?
If this joint toolbar comes to fruition, which it never will, the crowd will decide the obvious winner for practically all queries. At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?
At that point what will be the difference between Bing and Google?
Speed of innovation. It's not our job to make it easy for them to have diffentiation. I just want great results. The more parity we give them with respect to data, the harder they'll have work to innovate in order to differentiate. AFAICT, that benefits us the users.
I didn't suggest it should be our job to make it easy for them. I want great results too and I want it without ads and spam getting in the way as well. In fact there should be more tools integrated into browsers to allow the user to own their own click stream and browsing pattern data and "sell" it to the highest bidder. Do you know of such tools? I don't. We are even at the point both in terms of computational power and data storage costs that each user could potentially have their own web crawler/search engine. The bing and google bars basically steal this information from users and in return provide little to no improvement on search results. The point I was making was that there is absolutely no incentive on either side to share knowledge and converge onto a high quality, common query result set because both companies try really really hard to not appear like the other guy and the result set is part of this.
My take on this is quite the opposite. If MS thinks they're doing nothing wrong, they shouldn't stop. They should do what is best for their customers.
Reversing what they do now because Google "caught" them, would IMO, imply they were doing something wrong and got caught.
I personally think what Bing is doing is great. I regularly use Bing and Google. I wish there were a streamlined way for me to broadcast to both of them... "for search term X this is the relevant link!"
MS has found a way to do this, and as long as its opt-in, I like it. I wish Google had the same (although I do realize that since Google owns so much of the traffic it is less of an issue for them -- its a net loss in terms of the flow of information).
But maybe a question for Matt... Can you and MS work together for a toolbar that does just this for both engines?
As a user this isn't a matter of Bing copying Google or not. But its about the fact that search relevance still kind of sucks. I feel like I can make the search experience better, especially in those occassions when I go to your competitors site.