It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox
- Reference: 1708929134
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/02/26/google_antitrust_defense_apple_bing/
- Source link:
Those claims surfaced last Friday in a [1]filing [PDF] from Google in its antitrust case against the US government.
The filing includes the Annie Lennox reference in testimony from John Giannandrea, Apple's vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. Giannandrea clearly appreciated that, while Lennox is best known for her time in The Eurythmics and subsequent solo work, her break came as a singer in The Tourists. In 1979 that band covered Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You" and reached number four on the UK singles chart.
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In 2018, Giannandrea used Bing to research the singer's career because Microsoft had approached Apple in the hope of displacing Google as Safari's default search engine. When he asked Bing to name Lennox's first band, the results mentioned only The Eurythmics.
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Giannandrea wasn't impressed by that, nor Bing's lack of local language coverage in markets Apple cared about, nor the poor progress Microsoft had made improving the search engine since the two tech giants previously discussed search preferences during 2015 and 2016.
In meetings with Redmond, Giannandrea felt Microsoft acknowledged Bing's shortcomings and "gave us a detailed presentation of what they were not doing, presumably to motivate us to say, 'Hey if we invested in this together, we could do these things."
[5]
Giannandrea's testimony, as recorded in the filing, also states: "Microsoft was willing to sell Bing, which you wouldn't do if it was a strategic asset."
[6]Europe loosens the straps tying Apple and Microsoft to tough antitrust rules
[7]Google coughs up $700M in Play Store antitrust suit
[8]Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly
[9]Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator
The filing is part of Google's defense in the antitrust case that alleges it flouted competition laws to build its dominance of the US search market.
The Apple anecdotes are important, because they illustrate how the iGiant tested Google and Bing, and rejected the latter on grounds it produced inferior results and monetization opportunities for Apple. Even after Microsoft promised to improve Bing during 2015 and 2016, the filing states, the search engine still had flaws Apple could not excuse in 2018.
The filing also reports that from 2014 to 2017 Mozilla made Yahoo ! the default search engine in Firefox on condition it improve the quality of search results. Yahoo ! did not deliver, and Mozilla ended the deal. Privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo, the filing alleges, sometimes preferred to funnel fresh sources of funding to investors rather than improve its own service.
The thrust of the filing is that Google invested a lot to make its search service excellent, while rivals never succeeded in attempts to match it – so Google is not a ruthless monopolist, but a restless innovator. Even the presence of Google search in Android and Chrome, the filing argues, did not preclude competition.
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The proof of that argument, the filing suggests, is that the likes of Apple kept doing business with Google because no better option existed in the US.
Advertisers, the filing argues, also found Google's services superior.
The web giant clearly hopes its sweet dreams of exoneration are made of this filing – and who are we to disagree?
And even if Google loses, it wins. As Eurythmics wrote: "everybody's looking for something" – and these days that means using search engines. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/02/26/us_v_google.pdf
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZdxvWysy6rWQvqHIi9qVsQAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZdxvWysy6rWQvqHIi9qVsQAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZdxvWysy6rWQvqHIi9qVsQAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZdxvWysy6rWQvqHIi9qVsQAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/apple_microsoft_dma_exemptions/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/google_play_store_antitrust_settlement/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/epic_v_google_epic_wins/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/01/google_submits_complaints_about_microsoft/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZdxvWysy6rWQvqHIi9qVsQAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: If you're on Safari
First you navigate - Netscape Navigator
then you explore - Internet Explorer
then you conquer - Konqueror
then you go on a safari - Safari
Re: If you're on Safari
Then you become The Loneliest Man in the World
My coat was stolen :(
Sounds like Google (Meta / Microsoft / Amazon / ...), alright
Some of them want to use use
Some of them want to abuse you
I'm not sure who would trust Google for anything after the altered reality that Gemini has been coughing out.
Anyway, DuckDuckGo: sounds like the cure is as bad as the disease.
If Google loses, it does not win
If they aren't allowed to pay Apple to be Safari's default search engine then Apple will either go with someone else (giving them a huge funding/usage boost) or do their own search engine (they've been crawling the web for over a decade, they presumably have a search engine internally that's "ready to go" if needed, and apparently it is used for some stuff like certain Siri queries)
Neither outcome would be something Google would call a "win". They would view it as a very big loss to have that much traffic - especially traffic from customers with a higher than average disposable income - taken away from Google Search. Whatever they're paying Apple, they are obviously making a lot more than that in revenue so it will cost them real money even ignoring the competitive impact.
Re: If Google loses, it does not win
They might not actually lose that much. After all, Bing is the default search engine on Windows, and pretty much everyone changes it to Google.
Jealousy
> Bad search results for the query "Annie Lennox first band"
Do you can make Bing cross by asking about other singers.
Re: Jealousy
The top result for this search in the goo monster is now this article...
Whyyyyy, whyyyyyyy whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
[1]Why?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG7I4oniOyA&pp=ygUQYW5uaWUgbGVubm94IHdoeQ%3D%3D
I can only assume that is a link to Annie Lennox singing "Delilah".
Please remove the tracking cookie (&pp=$TRACKING_ID) from your U-Bend links in future. Otherwise Google knows exactly who posted what where, and who clicked on it.
Just tried, it now answers with a link to a Wikipedia article. “Moderate success with The Tourists”, not a direct answer.
Siri shows three answers as text, and The Tourists are visible on my screen twice (and Eurythmics are not). Well, would be bad if Siri couldn’t answer this.
"willing to sell Bing, which you wouldn't do if it was a strategic asset."
Ooh, burn. So, Borkzilla wanted to one-up Google, found out the hard way that it's not so easy, and is now stuck with something it can't kill because it integrated the damn thing into every part of its OS.
Sounds like schadenfreude to me . . .
The thrust of the filing is that Google invested a lot to make its search service excellent,
Now that is funny, but also a damn lie.
Better than Bing etal, but still crap if you want to filter out words, etc, or tell it to ignore specific sites as they seem to appear at the top of the list for no good reason at all (reddit, quora)
While I'm in the mood for conditional expressions . . .
The Tourists > Annie Lennox
"Luminous Basement" and "Reality Effect" are both sublime hard-core pop, and as for "Blind Among the Flowers" . . .
Sums up the whole problem really
The very fact that there are such discrepancies between the results of different 'search engines' demonstrates that they're not primarily searching for relevance to your request, they're filtering for commercial advantage. Yet again, the purpose is not to serve the user, it's to rake in dosh.
I remember with much sadness the Infoseeek engine in the early '90s. It accepted Boolean search strings and delivered anything that contained matching content. In those day you could actually refine your search progressively by adding qualifying terms. Today, the more terms you add to your search the greater the proportion of irrelevant twaddle the engine delivers to you. And no specific engine stands out as significantly better or worse -- they're all primarily commercial promo vehicles.
Re: Sums up the whole problem really
Google has removed, obsfucated or just ignores most of the basic functions you used to be able to use to get better results.
Clearly it's not to improve search for the end user but to prevent any avoidance of its list of paid for links.
But then the old rule applies, "if the service is free, you are the product". I'm not sure there even is a way to pay for search now to avoid this.
Re: Sums up the whole problem really
Except, you are the customer.
Or more accurately, you are their customers' customer. And if I no longer trust Google to give me the right search results, it means I no longer respond to their ads, which means their customers don't get my money, which means that Google doesn't get their money.
I've tried using Google to search for things I want to buy recently, and the results were so useless that I had to go elsewhere to find it.
Hm.
So "Annie Lennox first band" on Google says "the Tourists" unequivocally.
However "Annie Lennox first band" on Bing says: "Annie Lennox's first band was The Catch, which later evolved into The Tourists. She met Dave Stewart in 1975 and they first played together in 1976 in The Catch. After releasing one single as The Catch in 1977, the band evolved into The Tourists, where Lennox was the lead singer from 1977 to 1980."
Is this correct? It's apparently from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I'd trust. If so, I'd rate Bing a bit closer to the mark. but that's today's results, not the results from "back when" and I think Bing still sucks as a search engine.
So the trial is because Google "flouted competition laws to build its dominance of the US search market"
I think that's bullshit. I have no argument that Google is top dog in the US search market, and they did it simply by building a better search engine than Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and everybody else.
My beef with Google is that they've let that technical achievement rot in favor of manipulating the results as they see fit, and as they're paid. They've removed features such as boolean search, search operators, and they even had a feature for a while of "don't return results from this site" which is also gone. They have indeed abused their position as top search engine.
If you're on Safari
then you are a Tourist, no?