I think it was more that Baidu.com is the state sponsored competitor to Google China, and pretty much have been wiping the floor with Google in that country.
That move, claiming they were going to pull out of China because 12 email accounts were hacked (of human rights activists that weren’t even living in China) was pure PR that everyone was more than willing to lap up.
Same thing with that "Microsoft is indexing our results". As soon as you looked at the details, the PR dissolved.
Just 12 accounts hacked from China, really? I think it's pretty well documented that the hacking issues were more way more extensive than 12 account.
It's debatable whether it was government sponsored hacking or private citizens but regardless, it's a gross understatement to say it's 12 accounts. My own personal Gmail account from a Chinese IP a few days before the Google PR post.
No one doubts that IPs coming from China log-in-with-stolen-passwords into Gmail, hotmail, and mail.yahoo every single day.
Or that there are attempts to steal worthy information and data through other means.
Some of these attempts are state-sponsored, some are corporate-sponsored, others are crime-sponsored.
Russia does this, US does this, and just about every other player does this.
This happens every day.
It's nothing new.
The point is that Google entered China (the #1 known player in this game of hacking and espionage), then when the expected happened, used it's PR machine to pretend they were pulling out because of some of these attempts, with the main focus (in that PR attempt) on the dozen email accounts of activists.
The IE's toolbar reports click-throughs on links, even on Google search results.
Those click-throughs are weighted with 100s of other factors to establish a presence and relevance in Bing's index.
A dozen Google engineers spent a considerable time and effort trying to insert terms into Bing's index using the IE toolbar.
And all they could do was get a dozen terms through, nonsense terms such as "hiybbprqag", that had no other ranking factors. That last part is the important part (figure it out if you can).
What I call this is spamming, with a 10% success rate (I think they tried to game 100 terms into Bing’s index).
And then Google spined it for all it was worth.
Reporting CTR on links is about as standard as it gets.
So, per your admission, Microsoft's software monitors user behavior on a competitor's site (among others) and sends it back to the mothership, then they use that information to tune Bing's algorithm. How many of these data points do you think they get per day from all of their competitors? Millions?
If you seriously don't see the problem with that, then it doesn't brook further discussion. If your competitors got a leg up on your business to any degree because they were able to post-process the results of your work, you'd be furious.
If Bing (via IE+toolbar) improves its results for me by watching MY behavior (behavior I OWN, not Google), regardless if I'm on HN, on Amazon, on Google, or on some random-website, I'm fine with it.
Watching IE (+toolbar) users' behavior is not the same thing as using Google's work.
If you can't come to terms with the way click-stream data is gathered and how post processing works, that's your failure, not Bing's.
It's like if you don't get spoon fed exactly the flavor you expect (the one that agrees with your preconceived notion), you spit it back in my face.
Google came out and blatantly said Microsoft is copying its index. That is nothing more than a simple lie, that's designed to be easier to believe over a more complex truth.
That move, claiming they were going to pull out of China because 12 email accounts were hacked (of human rights activists that weren’t even living in China) was pure PR that everyone was more than willing to lap up.
Same thing with that "Microsoft is indexing our results". As soon as you looked at the details, the PR dissolved.