I think a more generalized solution will still work with this problem. When there's no center (ie beach extends infinitely), the hot dog vendors would choose to be close together for the simple fact that any distance between the two they share equally. Both vendors would seek to minimize this because any distance outside they claim completely for themselves.
To me, the stance that this professor is taking is absurd. He's not helping anyone but himself giving up on efforts to prevent cheating.
I really thought he would have made a compelling argument to resolve this, but it seems more like he's become so frustrated with cheating that he's resigned himself from that aspect of education.
With that said, I do disagree with the stance that universities take on cheating. The system of punishment is too focused on catching cheaters and punishing them so harshly as scare others to never consider it. I think this prevents many students from being more creative or exploring their own ideas based on previous work.
I believe cheating is not something a student commits because of inability, cheating is a crime of laziness. Therefore, rather than trying to catch cheating, schools should just making cheating pointless. Papers and assigments should be completely open and encourage students to look at any previous work and allow them to include it in their own work simply with a citation.
To add, professors seem to focused on their students finding credible sources to cite rather than allowing students to form their own ideas. Credible ideas can be founded from less credible sources and that is what should really matter.
From the article:
"Meanwhile, I’m on my third day of waiting to hear back from Google about just what exactly it does with its own toolbar. Now that the company has fired off accusations against Bing about data collection, Google loses the right to stay as tight-lipped as it has been in the past about how the toolbar may be used in search results."
And Google's sudden silence you don't find suspicious. This is the same company that invited the author of the original article to their headquarters the day after he wrote it.
If Google did the same thing with their toolbar, then Microsoft should be able to catch Google the same way Google caught Microsoft. Thus far they haven't although I am sure they are trying.
My recollection is Google has said several times that they don't use the toolbar tracking to effect search results. I can't find any sources right now though so I'm going from memory. One exception is tracking goes into personalized history which customizes search for that particular accounts results.
Inadvertently like the Bing toolbar. It has been shown to log every pageview like Bing toolbar. Whether they filter out the pageviews when a user goes to Bing no one knows besides Google. (ie: The article below shows they definetly do not filter it out at the application level as a Yahoo query is sent back by the Google Toolbar and Yahoo now runs on Bing).
Sigh....Two things:
1) Performing this sting and it working or failing wouldn't prove if they did it in the past...The cat's out of the bag. Bing or Google could have easily changed their systems. (and I'm sure the way the two incorporate clickstreams into their search engine is VASTLY different)
2) More importantly, why would Microsoft need to prove google is also using clickstreams? Microsoft does not believe using clickstreams is wrong.
> 2) More importantly, why would Microsoft need to prove google is also using clickstreams? Microsoft does not believe using clickstreams is wrong.
If they can make Google a hypocrite, the issue goes away. that's motivation enough for Bing to investigate the Google side (though I doubt they'd find much).
You cant make excuses for a lack of evidence. Like if you're caught copying someone's homework, you can't say "but nobody can prove he didn't also copy from me earlier". It's ultimately irrelevant; you can't conclude anything out of ignorance.
Even if they don't collect and use Bing outclicks in their calculations... if they're using clicks, and load-times, and view-times, and order-of-visit information from third-party unaffiliated Google sites, including potentially sites with robots.txt blocks against crawling, then they're doing things almost entirely analogous to Bing.
I believe Matt Cutts already stated that they don't use any click stream signals from their toolbar in their rankings. So much has been said about this that I haven't been able to find the quote. I may have even gotten wrong which Google employee said it.
He said they don't use Google Analytics data. He has also said that the toolbar doesn't affect the indexing of a page. I don't see anything about the toolbar affecting rankings though.
Hmm... I don't think that's what I was thinking of. The wording was very specific. I don't recall Google Analytics being part of the comment, but of course I could be mistaken.
The 'privacy' link from Analytics leads back to the general privacy pages, and their overall privacy policy says Google may use any information they have (from logs, cookies, etc.) to "[p]rovide, maintain, protect, and improve our services (including advertising services) and develop new services".
I like your stock market insider information analogy because it illustrates the flaw in Google's experiment very well. And very few people seem to realize it. I need to modify it slightly though to make it more analogous.
Suppose your financial advisor (Google) was suspecting that someone (Bing) was stealing their confidential financial reports on stocks. Suppose your financial advisor told you (Google Engineer) to buy 100 random shares (search and click on 100 specific search terms) and see if the suspect (Bing) acted on it.
Even if the suspect bought 100% of the shares (Bing indexes all the search terms with the irrelevant links), you still haven't proven the suspect is stealing information from the financial advisor because there's more than one source this information could have come from. It could have come from you (Google Engineer doing the clicking) or it could have come from your financial advisor (Google itself). A way to solve this issue is if you (Google engineer) had another financial advisor (another website) which told you to buy certain companies. If the suspect didn't act on those shares then you would have MUCH more conclusive evidence that the suspect was stealing from the financial advisor represented by Google.
Read google's "Bing Sting" experiment on Google's blog. Their test had no control variable (ie: running the same test on another website that wasn't Google). If they had done their expirement on another site and Bing results didn't change then Google would have a very plausible case against Bing.
Google fell into the classic trap of confirmation bias with bad scientific method. And thus the test was 'rigged', they never had a control variable.
Their assertion was not "bing is using clicks on google search and only google search." The assertion was just "bing is using clicks on google search." They've demonstrated that pretty conclusively.
Bing has never denied using clicks on google search. They have, in fact, admitted to using clicks in general before Google even began their experiments. Given that information, why should it be surprising that Google Search, as one of the most-clicked sites on the Internet, has a big impact on that?
Surprising or no, it's clearly pretty controversial. If you are using click data like this, you have to know that you'll end up essentially copying Google. People only click on the results that are there, and Google puts them there.
Of course it's controversial. Someone made a deliberate decision to stir up controversy over this. It's easy to make some controversy if you just use the right words. Words like "Cheating" and "Copying" are great for that.
If you really want examples, just watch Fox News or MSNBC for fifteen minutes. You'll probably see at least one or two examples in there somewhere.
You can't decide to reason through induction on one set of variables (all searches, not just "hzzxsqqdga", are copied by Bing) and leave it out on another (click data on all websites, not just Google, are copied by Bing).
The phrasing of "bing is using clicks on google search" implies that google search is a single case (I could likewise claim "bing is using clicks on duckduckgo") that does not extend to others.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "bing is using click data"? The fact that google.com is in a lot of that click data is a questionable decision and the root cause of all this drama.
Yes. Why can't people grasp this very simple idea before opening their mouths and spreading this FUD. I see even pg fell for this.
The only way the words "Bing copies google" would be justified is if MS were directly querying Google on certain keywords and ripping off search results. Google have provided no evidence to suggest this. I expected the commmenters of Techcrunch to be unable to grasp this, but it seems that HN is often like this too.
To be fair, I think that claim would be justified if they were "merely" grabbing the Google SERPs their users happen to receive, turning them into ranked lists of URLs, and using that data some way.
It would even be justified if they were harvesting click data only from Google (or explicitly treating that click data differently), because then they're just doing the last one, but obfuscating it: it would be like refusing to bribe a politician directly, but instead making a large "investment" in a corporation they own.
It's not a justified claim if they built a mechanism that genuinely gathers interesting data, and would continue to do so in Google's absence. I think Microsoft is claiming this, but their responses have been so murky that it's not 100% clear. Google certainly hasn't produced evidence that renders this version implausible.
Your "control variable" only matters if the hypothesis they are trying to prove is "Bing special-cases Google."
That is not the hypothesis. The hypothesis is "Bing has results in its index that it could not have gotten in any other way than from Google search results." Their experiment does indeed confirm that hypothesis.
The problem is, the intentionally ambiguous and misleading wording Google has been using implies the test was "Bing special-cases Google". This is why I'm not buying any of this. Google is smart enough to use precise language when they want to, and apparently not to when they want to.
If your analysis is correct, you should be able to explain a scenario under which, given Google's experiment, Bing's result for "hiybbprqag" came from somewhere other than Google.
It came from the Bing toolbar tracking the user browsing. Yes, obviously "hiybbprqag" came from Google. But that's because they only tested it on Google.
They never tested the fact that it could have come from any other website as well. Thus, they can't conclude that Bing is copying Google or whether its copying the user's browsing behavior.
> They never tested the fact that it could have come from any other website as well.
It doesn't matter, Google is only complaining about what Bing has copied from Google. What Bing copies from other sites is between them and the other site.
It means that they have falsely arrived at a conclusion due to positive bias. They might be right, but they haven't proven it sufficiently.
The inverse of the conclusions of their experiment are also incorrectly assumed (Google results, using IE8/Bing toolbar, make Bing results != Bing results, when using the IE8/Bing toolbar, are from Google).
My understanding is that running the experiment on some random other sites would work as well as long as Bing user's were actually clicking the honeypot links. This is probably the intended functionality of the click stream data. That doesn't change the fact that using this type of data from competitor search engines results in "stealing" (for lack of a better word) search results, particularly for rare terms such as "tarsorrhaphy".
So what exactly would a control that satisfies you be? How about I submit search terms on the computer terminal that connects to a server that isn't even on the internet. There, those searches do not end up affecting Bing.
The fact is that they used unique search terms that link to unique subjects. They ONLY submitted searches using what they described. That means the only places those searches passed through were the OS, toolbar, IE and Google. They know Google received those searches, did it propagate to Bing?
That's it. They didn't need to offer a placebo to anyone. It's like throwing a ball and hearing an echo. You don't need to NOT throw a ball just to make sure it doesn't echo.
