In the spirit of completeness, the paper says they use Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
But the paper doesn't say this is what Bing uses. Looks like it, but we should be clear. This is MSR, not Bing.
Good paper though. But it is another example of MS actually not thinking its bad. They published a paper on this where they spell out how MSR would do this. Did people in the academic community protest that this would be copying if implemented?
Yeah, I mean you could make the argument that it's just one piece of MS research among thousands of others, etc etc, but the fact that they've sunk resource into literally spying on Google (et al) is just too much. It could still turn out that Bing don't use that technique... but it's looking a lot less likely. Especially given this whole thing started based on Google noticing their spelling corrections popping up on Bing, and stealing Google's spelling corrections is exactly what this paper was about.
In one of the earlier threads there was discussion of MSR being in a bubble, and this is a good example. Did the people publishing that paper realize it could look like copying Google's results? Almost certainly not; as a researcher, this would look to me like I was showing that the approach worked across the three biggest search engines. Researchers are supposed to do stuff like that! But in this other non-research context, with billions of dollars at stake and Microsoft's track record of being the evil empire, it can look very different ...
[disclaimer: I was in MSR from 1999-2005 and then did competitive strategy for MS in 2006-2007. so that influences my perspective.]
But the paper doesn't say this is what Bing uses. Looks like it, but we should be clear. This is MSR, not Bing.
Good paper though. But it is another example of MS actually not thinking its bad. They published a paper on this where they spell out how MSR would do this. Did people in the academic community protest that this would be copying if implemented?