[benhedrington]

Yep, not saying it was a secret... Tim O'Reilly had it nailed back then... but the story I have to remind myself of is that too many times we go off face value rather than digging in and listening to people like Tim... This happens all over the place and it was worth capturing the story that replays in my head each time I see a new revision of it.

[varunsrin]

well, Marissa Mayer of Google explicitly stated in a public announcement in October 2007 that it was going to be used for speech recognition algorithms. And many, many news blogs published that.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your...

Your article makes it seem like the fact that Google was using 411 for voice analysis was somewhat 'unknown' until 2009, whereas I would say that the knowledge was actually quite mainstream and, frankly, hard to ignore.

I would argue that assuming that the Bing team completely failed to see all the news articles and press releases (from Google, no less) about this for 2 years, is perhaps a little presumptuous? Maybe, as another poster mentioned, they are still getting value out of the 411 service?

I do agree with your point, and there are many many times I've seen companies do this, but Bing 411 vs Google 411 might not be the right example since Google's intentions were very clear, right from the start.

Disclaimer: I work on MS Office (completely unrelated to Bing & the 411 service, but still not what you would call an unbiased source)

[kenjackson]

What did Tim say back then?

In any case, it was really well known what Google's goals were. In fact it was a pretty standard feedback technique used by all automated phone voice reoognition systems.

For Bing though this is also a branding opportunity. Google has relatively little to gain in branding with their 411 service, but for Bing it still has great upside potential.