Archive for February, 2011
The glamorous world of web development
In films, advanced computer users often spend their development time spinning round in their chairs, cracking their knuckles, doing handstands and other things aimed at, I don’t know, increasing blood flow or something (yes Swordfish I’m talking about you).
The reality is somewhat different, or course; certainly in our office. Here, a 30-minute spell of advanced development is compressed into 90 seconds, and the cookie-eating and conversations with the rest of the team (both in the office and remotely via Skype) are revealed.
Is Bing copying Google’s results?
According to this Google Blog post, “Bing is using Google web search results”. Essentially, what is happening is that Microsoft is tracking what their users search for, and what links they subsequently click. So if you have the Bing Toolbar installed and search using Google, the result you click on will be logged by Bing, which will add it to their own results. Google are not happy that their search results are being used in this way.
The effects are most noticable at the fringes, in rare or misspelled search phrases, where Google’s excellent results are easily seen on Bing. Microsoft, for their part, responded pretty clearly:
“We do not copy Google’s results”
Strangely, given everything mentioned above, I think that this is true. (Also, it’s clever obfuscation by Microsoft, as Google definitely does copy websites – it provides a cache of its latest crawl in the results – which has caused trouble in the past.)
Bing collects data from its users; it is those users who are collecting the data from Google (and presumably other search engines, both global and site-specific) and passing it on.
