I would wager most of the people commenting don't work in search and how to use datamining to improve search. I think it is useful to see the perspective of someone that actually thinks long and hard about building these types of systems before commenting on whether it is fair or innovative or just plain stealing. http://hunch.net/?p=1660

How do you know its the former and not the other. Google's experiment doesn't discriminate between the two.

Sorry you're right. The other possibility is that bing is scraping the query term and all of the links out of the search page, and correlating them immediately. That means they're totally susceptible to google bombing (which is in effect what google did).

The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.

Even if they are susceptible to Google bombing, I don't think Google would reduce the quality of it's results for real searches because of this.

Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.

They're not just susceptible to Google bombing. They are at the mercy of some easy to automate SEO with the bing toolbar installed. If I were a black hat I'd install the bing toolbar, craft some perhaps human looking Selenium code, and start the clicking. Over a period of a few weeks I'd be owning the top results in Bing.

I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.

I think that you have identified the biggest flaw with Microsoft's approach.

They are also susceptible to Google "poisoning" the well, by creating a bot-net to provide fake data to Bing.

Does the Bing toolbar algorithm associate all query string parameters with the subsequent click action? Or did the Bing algorithm toolbar have code that specifically targeted click actions on the Google search engine?

Was it just the top result that was copied or were more of the results copied as well?

To scrape, wouldn't Microsoft need to be following up to the followed clicks by sending a search query to Google? If that was happening, I'm pretty sure that Google would have said so.

The scraping could be done client side, after users perform the search, just send all the data to MS.

It would be interesting to see where the law comes down on tracking clicks for a competitive advantage. I doubt anything will get past handbags at dawn, as it could draw attention to click tracking on ads, and no-one want that.

Good point. This would require that the Bing toolbar be sending requests to Google, right?