Comment by mike_hearn
12 hours ago
You actually can "distill" web search. At one point Google accused Microsoft of doing this by monitoring clicks in IE to train Bing with Google click logs for better ranking. They discovered it by creating fake result pages with nonsensical queries and discovering the same results appeared in Bing a few weeks later.
https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...
They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.
Wouldn't that have required an insane amount of infrastructure to do? Infrastructure that they could have used to crawl... anything else?
That's very funny.
How many billions did they spend doing this? And they still haven't caught up.