marypcbuk

In one sense, Danny Sullivan publishing a story about Google accusing Bing of copying their search results on the eve of the Future of Search event that Bing is co-sponsoring that derailed the entire discussion on search quality and became a running joke throughout the full event - without giving Bing time to give a full response - is perfectly innocent. Google pitched the story to him the previous week but he didn't have time to get a briefing earlier so he ended up writing just before the event.

When you have a good story that you want to tell, from a good source, you want to publish. You might get scooped, you want credit for breaking news, there's even an element of excitement in getting the story and putting it straight out. There's a reason it's called breaking news.

But that's not why Sullivan says he posted when he did. He seems to be saying he posted straight away because Google wanted him to. "Yes, they wanted the news to be out before the Bing event happened — an event that Google is participating in. They felt it was important for the overall discussion about search quality." They didn't feel it was important for the overall discussion right after they did their experiment (which Shum calls a form of clickfraud; the gloves are off in this argument), which gave them results on Bing at the end of December; Google didn't offer Sullivan a story on what they called search relevancy until January 13th. And they didn't approach Microsoft to ask what was going on; they went straight for the publicity, right at the time of the Bing-sponsored conference.

And while I agree with Sullivan when he says his site isn't there to do PR for Google or to do PR for Bing, I think he just did do PR for Google by letting the source dictate the timing of the story. And as the executive editor of the New York Times put it just last week when talking about Julian Assange: "The relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it."

(And no, I don't think it's the same as taking information under an NDA - NDAs say I can't write about the topic before a certain date but don't force me to publish as soon as I can , although they do encourage it).

By serving the agenda of the source, you miss some of what the story could be. I've lambasted Microsoft for not joining the conversation by giving comment on some stories, but you have to be realistic. When you ask for comment on a big, controversial story on a day when some of the senior people in the team you're asking for comment are preparing for a big event and it's not something they already have a view on, you're probably not going to get a very detailed reply. I've asked fairly complex technical questions that have taken weeks working with the developer to get an answer on, because they literally didn't know what was happening. Unless this was a Sekrit Bing Plot All Along*, (in which case I'd expect there to be been a plausible denial on file ready to deploy), someone at Bing is going to have to look at the claims, find out what's happening inside the engine, find out why it's happening and decide what the policy is on that and what to say about it. And they have to work around whatever they had scheduled for that day, which just happens to be the day before the event when they're likely to be pretty busy preparing from.

That's pretty much what Sullivan seems to be saying happened. "Bing was allowed to have as much input as they wanted. I contacted them early on Monday morning, when I started working on this. I received a reply around 3pm Pacific, which I included in this article. That’s all they wanted to provide... I went out of my way to follow up even though I’d already been given a statement... [the spokesperson] said it was likely they’d have more to say when I see them after the event today."

If Sullivan had waited to post, with Bing's flat denial (kudos to Mary Jo Foley for getting an unambiguous quote to go with the explanation) and the extra details from Harry Shum's post, the article might have been less punchy (it wouldn't have had the line 'Bing doesn't deny this' in the first paragraph) but it would have been better journalism.

Would it have been a letdown after the Farsight event? Hard to say because without the article the discussion at the event would have been entirely different; the stories might have been about what search engines can do in the future rather than whether they're playing fair right now. I think a 'did they cheat' article would have had as much impact after the event - but it wouldn't have given Google the same level of exposure for the accusations and it wouldn't have turned an event that Bing had sponsored as an open forum for many different companies in the search arena into an open sparring match. This is pretty much journalism as spectator sport, and I like to think our profession is better than this.



* On balance, I don't think Bing was deliberately taking search results from Google; I've met enough Bing folks to believe that they they're smart enough to know that if they did that, they would get found out sooner or later and they'd face exactly this kind of backlash. I think they're getting those results from Google exactly the way they say they are; by mining user data, and no-one ever thought to go in and censor the Google search strings in there. Maybe they should have. (Maybe Google should filter out a lot more of the content spam sites that make money from Google ads before they get complaints about them rather than waiting until the results are so polluted that people complain; everyone is making a judgement call on these issues). I agree with Shum; Google uses user data (like the content of your email in Gmail) to apply ads, the Google toolbar has a long EULA just like the Bing bar and the IE 8 suggested sites feature - and as I've said a lot recently, when the service is free the users are part of the product being sold. Bing is trying to get better search results by looking at the pages real people visit - I wonder if the reason that only 7-9 out of 100 honeypot terms made it into Bing is something to do with the behaviour of the Googlers baiting the sting? - and real people use both engines. Maybe what the 'sting' actually reveals is that search results have a massive influence on where we go on the Web, and that is the point at which the search engines needs to take responsibility for the results they provide.

Everything you need to know, wondered about or didn't know you needed to know.

25 Windows Phone 7 tips and tricks

10 Windows Phone 7 problems solved: Reclaim memory from Zune, troubleshoot wireless sync, and more

Hands on: Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac review: it's not Zune

That definitive, in-depth Windows Phone 7 review again

Windows Live Essentials are all the extra apps Microsoft is no longer allowed to bundle with Windows; you can include Paint and WordPad but not Photo Gallery and Writer - or a mail client. And the name is odd; on the one hand, Microsoft needs a home for all the extra tools that co-ordinate with the Live services (Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, SkyDrive, MSN and to a lesser extend, Bing) - but on the other no-one is going to claim that the Bing Bar is an essential tool when just about every browser has a search tool you can set to use any search engine you want. The Family Safety tool ought to be essential, but it's still too complex (link all the users to Live accounts by hand) for what it does. Writer would be great but it still doesn't understand LiveJournal properly.

But Live Mail and Movie Maker are excellent at what they do (I maded a funny cat video in Movie Maker but luckily for you I ated it). The new social pane in Messenger is now how I read Facebook (and I wish Twitter would get its head out of its policy so I could read Twitter through it). I set up Sync and forgot about it and now my IE favourites and my Outook signatures are the same on both machines (I want it to do ribbon corrections and AutoCorrect settings and other customisations as well though) - and if I wanted to, I could remote desktop into any machine with Sync on. I do miss the 5GB of sync space from when it was Mesh; 2GB is mean so I'm only doing peer-to-peer syncing, but I'll use that to migrate everything to a new PC any time I get a new PC to work on because it's blissfully simple.

And Photo Gallery is great; it doesn't make me import all the images into another library, it just indexes them. All my favourite bugs are fixed (when I import photos I can pick tags from the existing database rather than typing them in wrong by hand, I can pick and choose which things are fixed when I use the automatic fix tools (contrast yes, straightening no) and I can open any image folder, not just the ones I've told Photo Gallery about). And the nifty 'combine the heads' tool that Bill Gates previewed back at CES 2007 (!) is finally available. This is me, making all the Google Wave team look happy at the same time...

For a more considered review with details and images that show the features in action, check out my piece on Tom's Guide. There's a companion piece about Five ways Hotmail beats Gmail - it's interesting to watch Google add in as many of the features Microsoft has put into the new Hotmail in Gmail since the announcement, but with a much more Google interface (ie ugly) - if Apple UI makes Microsoft UI look bad, Google UI makes Microsoft UI look amazingly friendly and smooth; if only Microsoft could put this consistently into all the products and not fall back to its own butt-ugly old-fashioned dialog boxes.

Also, if I see one more dialog asking me to make MSN my home page there are going to be consequences!

Multi-touch technologies have a long history.  To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first.  Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983.  This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation:  http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple.  It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product.  What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum.  While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way.  In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."