Sorry, this all seems like typical Google hating to me. If this were any other company having its results directly mirrored (like, say, the spam "content" sites covered so heavily in other threads here) people would be thinking and reacting very differently.
Here's the issue: Bing is not just learning from Google, they're *directly copying*; not only that but they're doing so without *reasonable further analysis*. In other words they're not just looking at what Google is doing and saying "Hmm, I wonder what it is about that site that makes it come up high in the results, let's analyze further". That makes sense. What they're actually doing is looking at Google results and using them as a *direct contributing factor* in their ranking, and in the absence of other significant factors as with rare keywords, Google's ranking becomes *the significant ranking factor*. This can result, as Google showed, in entirely non-relevant, spurious results being ranked top in Bing. So what if Google really does make a mistake or their results really are less relevant than they should be? Well unfortunately Bing is going to just mirror that, so there's no real innovation happening here, no improvement. Given that Bing purports to provide a superior search experience and better results (you know, the "decision engine" thing), this is pretty ridiculous.
The TechDirt article ignores some key points in the original Search Engine Land article and seems to me to be another obvious case of Google bashing. They call out Google for "whining" about this unnecessarily and that they should be "reacting to the negative stories about their search quality by improving instead of complaining about competitors", but this completely ignores the fact that Google's test was setup *before* all the stories about Google's worsening search quality became the rage. Not only that but the same article ignores the test results discussed in the original SEL article which show that yes, in fact, Bing *is*
copying results from Google, not just "learning from" (as demonstrated by the entirely spurious results Google seeded as a honeypot). Both articles even acknowledge that the tech media has a hard-on for stories about Google's search quality issues too, despite the fact that no unbiased tests have yet proven there to be *any demonstrable, repeatable problem* that other search engines do not also suffer from.
So tell me, who is biased, who is jumping on the bandwagon here? I swear, first it was Microsoft that everyone loved to hate, now MS has almost become an underdog and it's Google and Apple.
- Oshyan
