I have a much lower opinion of the Bing team after reading this non-denial denial. It's disingenuous to act surprised that using clickstream data from your main competitor might be called copying.
And I have much lower opinion of the Google team (and they had much further to fall). They intentionally use ambiguous and loaded words like "copying" specifically to stir up drama. Google is smart enough to use precise words when they want, and not to when they want. The ambiguity was intentional.
I don't think it's ambiguous. They are contending that bing is intentionally using this to recreate results similar to google's. I'm guessing you feel this is ambiguous because you don't think it is supported by the data, not because they are saying anything unclear.
Characterizing it as "copying" is what's ambiguous. This can easily be seen by reading most discussions about this. People are arguing past each other, armed with their own personal definition of "copying". The facts are that make-believe search results showed up on Bing after Google intentionally tried to train Bing to pick up the association. Declaring this to be "copying" is begging the question.
> The facts are that make-believe search results showed up on Bing after Google intentionally tried to train Bing to pick up the association. Declaring this to be "copying" is begging the question.
Well, it was trained by having the Bing toolbar see people clicking those results on Google's search engine.
But I do think you're right that people are talking past each other and what outrages one person could very well be something that another simply doesn't care about.
