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Google’s Hypocrisy Over Bing’s Theft Of Search Results

by | 3rd, February 2011

GOOGLE claims that Microsoft’s Bing is ‘stealing‘ Google’s search results.

Sebastian Antony explains that Google created fake queries and result on its search engine to test Bing. On December 17, Google engineers tested these results on different browsers and sites. And, as if by magic, by December 31, some of these fake results began appearing on Bing.

Tsk! How dare one huge American corporation use information from a third party site just like another huge American corporation on the once free internet? Antony calls the results “damning“. But Martin Belam is more pragmatic:

Back in the mid-2000s, there were repeated accusations from webmasters that Google was indexing development sites before they had attracted any backlinks at all. The only way, they argued, that Google could have discovered the URL was through looking at the logs of people browsing with the Google toolbar installed, although Matt Cutts tried to debunk that theory in 2008.

And:

Google has repeatedly argued that crawling, indexing and displaying snippets of other people’s content and intellectual property is protected by fair use, and a service for which we should be grateful. If Bing shows snippets of Google’s results, why isn’t that the same thing? 😉

If it helps the user, what the harm? Or is the internet just a thing to be owned..?

Spotter: Cynical-C



Posted: 3rd, February 2011 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink