I haven't got much to add since I've expressed my views previously, plus this blog post does a good job of calmly pointing out the issues. It's worth emphasising the penultimate paragraph from the blog post since I feel it's key here though:
"Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It's because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing's rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says "we don't know how much of this win came from Google" does a disservice to everyone. I think Bing's engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it's due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark"
I agree with this entirely. Given Bing's resources, it seems bizarre that they were relying on Google's results even a little bit. And until they sort this issue out, I definitely agree that it's difficult to know when to give credit to Bing.
(Plus it's made all the more difficult considering that Bing keep sort of denying this whole mess, despite the quite conclusive proof. I suspect that if they do stop using Google's results, we won't know about it considering the hole that Bing have dug themselves with their denials. Ah well, que sera sera).
"Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It's because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing's rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says "we don't know how much of this win came from Google" does a disservice to everyone. I think Bing's engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it's due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark"
I agree with this entirely. Given Bing's resources, it seems bizarre that they were relying on Google's results even a little bit. And until they sort this issue out, I definitely agree that it's difficult to know when to give credit to Bing.
(Plus it's made all the more difficult considering that Bing keep sort of denying this whole mess, despite the quite conclusive proof. I suspect that if they do stop using Google's results, we won't know about it considering the hole that Bing have dug themselves with their denials. Ah well, que sera sera).