Bing and Google: Search Short Cuts
February 3, 2011
Take a deep breath. Exhale slowly. Wizards of search, journalists, and corporate types discover that major Web search vendors “copy” results. The story broke in a popular blog by a search engine optimization ”expert”. The former journalist’s story was “picked up”—a nice way to say “inspired”—the Wall Street Journal. Is this type of emulation taking place? You bet. Search vendors do everything possible to make sure that certain queries return comparable, if not identical results. The reason is that advertisers want to know an ad will appear in a similar, if not identical, context. How many ways are there to pull off this trick? Many. Tuning is one. Copying in a manner similar to a metasearch? Hit boosting is a third. If still online, check out the WSJ’s revelation. If the link is bad, snag a hard copy of Mr. Murdoch’s emulation of the New York Times and check out the story. Yikes, another similarity? Nah, coincidence.
We find three points about this “new” discovery interesting.
First, it took a long time for the Google to realize that its increasingly frustrating results lists were appearing on Bing. Oh, the opposite has surfaced in our own queries.
Second, Google and Bing are not concerned about returning result sets that focus on the user. Both outfits have other concerns, not the least of which is doing a killer demo of ad insertion, showing off the “user experience”, and making clear to anyone who compares result lists over time, many vendors in a one-two race will become more alike with each passing month. Anyone remember ABI/INFORM and Management Contents? How about Ovid medical information and Thomson’s medical information.
Third, as casual searchers get a clue, then the issue of similarity becomes easier to notice.
Our question: What’s taken the really smart guys to figure out a basic fact of online competition? That tells me that the so called “real” experts are still running queries with training wheels. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2011
Freebie unlike the ads of Bing and Google
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