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Stories filed under: "bing"

Techdirt Has Again Been Removed From Bing And (Mostly) DuckDuckGo

from the not-this-again dept

Welp, here we go again. Last month I wrote about how Techdirt had been deleted from both Bing and DuckDuckGo. Over on the discussion at HackerNews, DDG’s CEO and founder, Gabriel Weinberg, jumped in to the conversation to note that this wasn’t intentional (which we never suspected it was). The resulting conversation on HackerNews is actually pretty interesting, as it appears there was some level of misunderstanding among many users about how much DuckDuckGo relies on Bing for its underlying web search.

Either way, a few hours later DuckDuckGo added back… a single link(!) to Techdirt’s front page, which we mentioned in an update. The next day, I heard from a couple people who said they had reached out to people at Microsoft, and I was told that this sometimes happen, and that the Bing team will eventually fix it (though it might happen faster if something gets public attention). Either way, about a day after I had written about Techdirt being erased, we were back in both Bing and DuckDuckGo and I considered it a one-off bug that had been fixed.

But… it’s back. I happened to just check on Bing and saw that we’re gone again (though now there’s also a big obnoxious box trying to get me to chat):

But, this time it’s weird, because it says there are 2,030 results (should be a lot more!) and then says “some results have been removed,” but it shows no results at all. If you click on the “2” at the bottom, it just takes you right back to this exact same view.

As for DDG, it still displays the one single link to our homepage and nothing else:

While that may be better than nothing, it’s pretty close to nothing. We do still get a fair bit of traffic from people searching for particular stories and now neither Bing nor DDG will send people to those stories. I did some searches on our most popular articles, like the Elon speedrun and the “you’re wrong about 230” and… all the results send people to other sites talking about our article.

Which isn’t really great.

Meanwhile, Google returns 94,900 results which is much closer to our total number of pages.

I’d really like for there to be real competition for Google out there in the search market, but it shouldn’t require me having to nag a trillion dollar company in Redmond every few weeks to put me back into their index.

Filed Under: bing, search index, search results, techdirt
Companies: duckduckgo, microsoft, techdirt

Microsoft Tried To Cozy Up To Newspaper Publishers… Who Are Now Claiming Microsoft Is Trying To Stiff Them

from the they'll-always-want-more dept

A few months after the snippet tax was agreed to as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there planned to make Internet companies pay newspapers for sending the latter extra traffic, by imposing something called the News Media Bargaining Code. In a blog post from December 2020, Mel Silva, VP, Google Australia & New Zealand, gave a good analysis of why Australia’s proposed Code was antithetical to the way the Web worked, including the following:

It forces Google to pay to show links in an unprecedented intervention that would fundamentally break how search engines work. No website and no search engine pays to connect people to other websites, yet the Code would force Google to include and pay for links to news websites in the search results you see. This sets the groundwork to unravel the key principles of the open internet people use every day—something neither a search engine nor anyone who enjoys the benefits of the free and open web should accept.

A few weeks later, Google turned up the pressure, and threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the News Media Bargaining Code went ahead. At this point, Microsoft sensed an opportunity to make life harder for its rival in the online search market. Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, published the following post of his own, stating that in contrast to Google:

Microsoft fully supports the News Media Bargaining Code. The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses. It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations. While Microsoft is not subject to the legislation currently pending, we’d be willing to live by these rules if the government designates us.

The reason why Microsoft was happy to throw the entire Web under a bus became clear later in the post:

Microsoft will ensure that small businesses who wish to transfer their advertising to Bing can do so simply and with no transfer costs. We recognise the important role search advertising plays to the more than two million small businesses in Australia.

We will invest further to ensure Bing is comparable to our competitors and we remind people that they can help, with every search Bing gets better at finding what you are looking for.

Bing is Microsoft’s largely forgotten search engine. In the desperate hope that making things difficult for Google might encourage a couple of people to switch to Bing, Microsoft decided to cozy up to the newspaper industry that was hell-bent on undermining the Web. A few weeks after Smith’s blog post, Microsoft joined with European newspaper publishers to call for the Web to be weakened there too.

Given that cynical attempt to use bad legislation to attack its rivals, it is gratifying to see that Microsoft’s plan of working with newspaper publishers isn’t going so well, as reported here by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (translation via DeepL):

The collecting society Corint Media wants to enforce the demands of press publishers for the ancillary copyright against Microsoft in court. The company announced in Berlin on Friday [1 April 2022] that the step had been taken “after more than two years of talks without an acceptable result on an appropriate remuneration.”

Apparently, Microsoft had offered 700,000 euros for its 2022 use of newspaper material in the Bing search engine and MSN.com. The publishers, however, demanded 20 million euros. Microsoft had obviously forgotten that, as far as the copyright industry is concerned, coziness counts for nothing, and that enough is never enough.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: aggregators, bing, eu, germany, link tax, search
Companies: corint media, microsoft

Content Moderation Case Study: Bing Search Results Erases Images Of 'Tank Man' On Anniversary Of Tiananmen Square Crackdown (2021)

from the tank-man's-gone-missing dept

Summary: On the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, internet users noticed Microsoft’s Bing search engine was producing some interesting results. Or, rather, it wasn’t producing expected search results for some possibly interesting reasons.

Users searching for the most iconic image of the protests — that of the unidentified person known only as “Tank Man” — were coming up empty. It appeared that Microsoft’s search engine was blocking results for an image that often serves as shorthand for rebellion against the Chinese government.

As was reported by several web users, followed by several news outlets, the apparent blocking of search results could be observed in both the United States and the United Kingdom, leaving users with the impression the Chinese government had pressured Microsoft to moderate search results for “tank man” in hopes of reducing any remembrance of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 2,500-3,500 protesters.

The apparent censorship was blamed on Microsoft’s close relationship with the Chinese government, which allowed its search engine to be accessed by Chinese residents in exchange for complying with government censorship requests.

This led to Microsoft being criticized by prominent politicians for apparently allowing the Chinese government to dictate what users around the world could access in relation to the Tiananmen Square protests.

Company Considerations:

Issue Considerations:

Resolution: Shortly after the apparent censorship of the iconic “Tank Man” image was reported, Microsoft claimed the very timely removal of relevant search results was the byproduct of “accidental human error.”

However, the company refused to offer any additional explanation. And, while searching the term “Tank Man” produced search results in Bing, it did not generate the expected results.

Several hours after the first “fix,” things returned to normal, with “Tank Man” searches bringing up the actual Tank Man, rather than just tanks or tanks with men near or on the tanks.

More clarification and comment was sought, but Microsoft apparently had nothing more to say about this “human error” and its conspicuous timing. Nor did it offer any details on whether or not this “human error” originated with its Beijing team. It also didn’t explain why the first fix resulted in images very few people would associate with the term “Tank Man.”

Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

Filed Under: bing, china, content moderation, search, search results, tank man, tiananmen square
Companies: microsoft

Microsoft Offers To Break The Web In A Desperate Attempt To Get Somebody To Use Its Widely-Ignored Bing Search Engine

from the opportunistic-much? dept

One of the key battles surrounding the EU Copyright Directive involves the threshold at which upload filters will block the use of copyright material in things like memes and mashups. A year ago, Germany was proposing ridiculously tight restrictions: 128-by-128 pixel images, and three-second videos. Now, it is framing the issue in terms of uses that aren’t “automatically” blocked by upload filters. The proposed limits here are 15 seconds of video or audio, 125K graphics, and 160 — yes, 160 — characters of text (original in German). Even these tiny extracts could be subsequently blocked by upload filters, depending on the circumstances.

The worsening situation over upload filters has obscured the other bad idea of the EU Copyright Directive: the so-called “link tax“, which would require large Internet companies like Google to pay when they use even small amounts of news material. One worrying development in this area is that the idea has spread beyond the EU. As Techdirt reported, Australia is bringing in what amounts to a tax on Google and Facebook for daring to send traffic to legacy news organizations — notably those of Rupert Murdoch. In July last year, the Australian government released a draft of what is now dubbed the “News Media Bargaining Code“. One of the people arguing against the idea is Tim Berners-Lee (pdf):

Requiring a charge for a link on the web blocks an important aspect of the value of web content. To my knowledge, there is no current example of legally requiring payments for links to other content. The ability to link freely — meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees — is fundamental to how the web operates, how it has flourished till present, and how it will continue to grow in decades to come.

He concludes: “If this precedent were followed elsewhere it could make the web unworkable around the world.” This, indeed, is the danger here: if Australia and the EU go ahead with their plans, it is likely to become the norm globally, with serious consequences for the Internet as a whole.

In response, Google has threatened to pull out of Australia entirely. That’s probably just part of its negotiating strategy. In a blog post from a couple of months ago, Mel Silva, VP for Google Australia & New Zealand, wrote: “we strongly believe that with the practical changes we’ve outlined [in the post], there is a path forward.” Similarly, Australian’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is now talking of a “constructive” conversation with Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. But that hasn’t stopped Microsoft sensing an opportunity to make life harder for its rival in the online search market. Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, has published the following intervention:

Microsoft fully supports the News Media Bargaining Code. The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses. It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations. While Microsoft is not subject to the legislation currently pending, we’d be willing to live by these rules if the government designates us.

And here’s why it “fully supports” this misguided link tax:

Microsoft will ensure that small businesses who wish to transfer their advertising to Bing can do so simply and with no transfer costs. We recognise the important role search advertising plays to the more than two million small businesses in Australia.

We will invest further to ensure Bing is comparable to our competitors and we remind people that they can help, with every search Bing gets better at finding what you are looking for.

That is, in a desperate attempt to get someone to use its still largely-ignored search engine Bing, Microsoft is apparently willing to throw the Web under the bus. It’s an incredibly short-sighted and selfish move. Sure, it’s legitimate to want to take advantage of a rival’s problems. But not to the extent of causing serious harm to the very fabric of the Web, the hyperlink.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: australia, bing, competition, google tax, link tax, links, news
Companies: google, microsoft

Apparently Not Too Many People In Europe Care About Having Microsoft's Bing 'Forget' Them

from the bing-is-already-forgotten dept

It’s no secret that Google has a much larger market share than Microsoft’s Bing search engine — especially in Europe where Google has been much more successful than its competitors. However, Bing and other search engines are still subject to the terrible EU Court of Justice ruling on the right to be forgotten, which has resulted in Google removing a bunch of links. As we noted, Google was flooded with requests, and had to set up a process and staff to handle them all — something it hasn’t done a very good job with so far.

So, what’s Microsoft doing? Well, it’s taking it’s time, but is promising to get a request form similar to Google’s up. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to have to hire a very big staff to do so, because it appears that Microsoft’s biggest concern in Europe may be more that it’s been forgotten by Europeans. Almost no one is asking Bing to forget them:

When Google released its web form on May 30, for instance, it received about 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours. Microsoft is thought to have received fewer than 20 requests that day.

Ouch. That’s almost insulting. Hell, even we received a request under that ruling (though a bogus one).

Filed Under: bing, europe, right to forget
Companies: google, microsoft

Microsoft Sends Google A DMCA Notice… To Block Microsoft's Bing Search Engine

from the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up dept

Ah, bogus DMCA notices that you just can’t make up. TorrentFreak has a good article highlighting a completely bogus DMCA notice from Microsoft (sent by one of its partners on its behalf) that tries to take a bunch of legitimate news sites out of Google’s index, on the mistaken claim that they violated Windows 8 copyrights. But, even more ridiculous is an aside mentioned in the article, that some other DMCA notices appear to target Bing, Microsoft’s own search engine. Indeed, they’re not that hard to find. If you look up DMCA notices asking Google to remove links to Bing, Microsoft shows up quite a bit:

If you dig down, you can find out the specifics, such as this DMCA notice sent on May 23 of this year, sent by Marketly on behalf of Microsoft, supposedly to stop the infringement of Office 2010. It lists out 997 URLs that it wants Google to take out of its search results, including a link to a Bing search. Given that Microsoft owns Bing… you’d think it would remove that search first. What’s even more amusing is that if you go to the link in question on Bing… it’s still there.

Yes, this is yet another silly move by an automated system, but it once again highlights some of the ridiculousness involved in DMCA takedowns for search results.

Filed Under: automated, bing, copyright, dmca, takedowns
Companies: google, microsoft

from the how-about-that... dept

We just wrote about Google’s very cool, new copyright transparency tool, which lets you dig into the details of all the search takedowns that Google gets. As people start to play around with the site, some interesting things are coming to light. Lots of people noticed that the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was… Microsoft. While some have suggested this is an attempt by a competitor to worsen Google’s search rankings, that’s difficult to believe for a variety of reasons. If Microsoft were issuing bogus takedowns, that would certainly come to light pretty quickly.

However, what is interesting is that you can use the new system to play around and notice that Microsoft doesn’t always seem to take down from its search engine, Bing, the same links that it orders Google to takedown. As we noted in our original post, there’s been plenty of talk suggesting that Google isn’t fast enough in taking down things upon DMCA request, but the company claims that they average less than 11 hours — and considering that they’re processing over 1 million takedowns per month (and are checking them by hand), that’s pretty impressive. How long does it take Microsoft to take content down?

Well, you would think that if Microsoft is sending a takedown notice to Google to remove a site from its search engine, that it’s almost certainly letting Bing know to remove it too, right? Why wouldn’t it. But if you do some digging, you can find sites that Microsoft has ordered taken down from Google, but which are still available via Bing. Here’s just one example. If you look through Google’s transparency report, there’s a specific search takedown request that was filed on May 11, so not too long ago. You can see the full ChillingEffects notice here as well. The takedown was sent, on behalf of Microsoft, by a company called Marketly, who appears to send a large number of takedowns, according to the Google data. In this case, Marketly had sent a takedown to Google demanding the removal of a bunch of URLs from its index concerning a variety of XBox 360 games, including DiRT 2. The 20th URL listed goes to a page on TorrentRoom.

Now, if you take that URL and put it into Google and Bing, you get two very different responses. First, there’s Google:

Okay. As per the takedown, clearly Google has removed that URL from its index. Now how about Microsoft:

Whoops! There it is. Now, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that if Marketly is sending a takedown to Google to get such a link taken out of its search engine, on behalf of Microsoft, that it quite likely is issuing the same kind of takedown to Microsoft’s Bing (hell, you’d perhaps think that Microsoft could just pull the link without a takedown). And yet… the site, which Microsoft supposedly wants to disappear, is gone from Google, but found easily on Bing.

This would suggest that, either Marketly and Microsoft decide to leave up certain infringing content on Microsoft’s own search engine while taking it down from Google… or that Microsoft certainly isn’t that fast at doing removals. And yet, why don’t we hear the people who always bitch about Google complaining about Microsoft?

Of course, the data is also revealing some other interesting “issues” with Microsoft’s takedowns. Kurt Opsahl, for example, noticed that Microsoft sent Google a takedown, you can view here, which claims that previous takedown notices, also from Microsoft, are in fact, infringing. This one was also sent by “Marketly” and suggests that they don’t do much research to make sure the sites are legitimately infringing before issuing takedowns.

Filed Under: bing, search, takedown, transparency
Companies: google, marketly, microsoft

DailyDirt: Just Another Day On The Job

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

For some folks, it’s Columbus Day AND a day off from work. For those of you who didn’t go to work today, here are a few interesting stories about working in some unique (or seemingly unique) situations.

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: bing, columbus day, iphone4 scoop, rock climbing, washington monument
Companies: apple, microsoft

Microsoft Highlights Why Google's 'Cheater' Accusations Ring Hollow

from the good-for-them dept

We had a long discussion recently about Google’s response to discovering that Microsoft used clickstream data from users to help improve the relevance of their own search. Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi has now written up a much more detailed response from Microsoft’s point of view, in which it again clarifies that contrary to Google’s statements, Microsoft is not “copying” Google’s search results, but merely using clickstream data as one of many (Microsoft says approximately 1,000) variables in improving search relevance. Microsoft does take one cheap shot: noting that, technically, the “honeypot” trick that Google used to uncover this certainly appears to be a form of “clickfraud.” That is, it was a trick designed specifically to manipulate Bing’s search results.

But the key point is made towards the end:

We have brought a number of things to market that we are very proud of — our daily home page photos, infinite scroll in image search, great travel and shopping experiences, a new and more useful visual approach to search, and partnerships with key leaders like Facebook and Twitter. If you are keeping tabs, you will notice Google has “copied” a few of these. Whether they have done it well we leave to customers. But more importantly, we take no issue and are glad we could help move the industry to adopt some good ideas.

That’s the point that I tried to make in the original post. History has shown that innovation occurs via competition, and part of that competition often involves competitors building on each other’s work. A few months back, I wrote a review of the excellent book Copycats by Oded Shenkar, which makes this point very, very clear. Innovation happens when companies build on each other’s work. But, what you learn is that it’s not just about “copying,” it’s about all of the players learning, innovating and expanding the overall market. Just straight up copying rarely does enough to make a difference (in fact, we’ve discussed this problem in the form of cargo cult copying, where companies just copy some superficial aspect, and discover that it’s meaningless). That’s clearly not what Microsoft was doing here.

In the comments to our original post, someone made the comment, in defense of Google, by saying if what Microsoft did was okay, then couldn’t he just go out and say “I’ve got a billion dollar search engine idea!” and then just copy Google’s results. But, of course, if anyone actually thinks this through, they’d realize that copying Google’s search results is not a billion dollar search idea. Assuming that, tomorrow, we launched a “new search engine” that gave the identical results to Google, almost no one would use it. Why would you? There’s no real advantage to doing so. And for people who already use Google, it’s probably much more integrated into their lives, with Gmail, Google Docs and more. The search results themselves are not the “billion dollar idea.” It’s the overall execution.

Hopefully Google learns from this and realizes that it has learned plenty from watching Microsoft as well, and complaining about Microsoft using clickstream data is a waste of time. Focus on continuing to innovate, Google, which’ll probably mean learning more things from Microsoft, in addition to what you’re doing yourself.

To be fair, Matt Cutts also has a put together a decent response, where he points out that the real issue here may be disclosure — in that Microsoft did not clearly disclose that it was using clicskstream data (and especially how it was using that data). That’s a perfectly reasonable point, but it was not the original point that Google raised. I agree that Microsoft could and should be much clearer in its disclosure — but that’s a totally separate issue. Cutts also explains why he thinks that Microsoft really is “copying,” but again, even if we grant that premise (which I don’t think is accurate), I still don’t see why that matters. Copying and improving is a part of the innovative process. Google should embrace it.

Filed Under: bing, copying, innovation, search
Companies: google, microsoft

Google's Childish Response To Microsoft Using Google To Increase Bing Relevance

from the get-over-it dept

It’s inevitable as a company gets bigger and older that rather than just competing in the market, it starts attacking competitors and accusing them of doing something “wrong.” It’s too bad that Google appears to have reached this stage. There have been plenty of stories lately about Google’s decreasing relevance and how its search results have been getting worse. There are plenty of ways to respond to this and improving search quality should be the main focus. But it looks like Google has, instead, decided to call out competitors. Specifically, Google set up an elaborate and pointless “sting operation,” which appears to show that Microsoft uses Google results as a part of its overall relevance algorithm. Basically, it looks like for users who have the Bing toolbar installed, Microsoft aggregates some search information, perhaps including Google results, and weighs them (only partially) into its own algorithm.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google’s search results are public and as an established player in the market, almost every comparison of alternative search engines, including Bing, compares it to Google. So, making use of Google data to improve its own rankings seems like a rather smart move.

Remember, too, that Google’s own search algorithm is based on viewing what people are doing online and coming up with a ranking based on that. How is that any different than Microsoft viewing a variety of information online — including Google’s own search rankings — and using that as the basis of its own rankings? But instead of recognizing that this is all perfectly reasonable, Google starts acting like the RIAA, accusing Microsoft of “cheating” and doing something that is potentially illegal. It even pops out this line from Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who apparently oversees Google’s search ranking algorithm.

“I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

As if Google hasn’t copied the work of others in the past? The very basis for the original Page Rank was “copied” from Jon Kleinberg’s research and then built upon that work. It was not a direct copy, just as Microsoft’s search results are not a direct copy. For Google to attack a competitor for using open information on the web — the same way it does — seems like the height of hypocrisy. It’s fine for Google to crawl and index whatever sites it wants in order to set up its ranking algorithms, but the second someone looks at Google’s own rankings as part of their own determination, suddenly its “cheating”?

This seems like the latest in a series of indications that Google has moved past the innovation stage into the “protecting its turf” stage. That would be a shame.

Filed Under: algorithms, bing, relevance, search
Companies: google, microsoft