>What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google...
Because what you describe would be underhand and probably a violation of Google's ToS that could cost them very dearly in PR and money (in a court case).
They have access to user data that users say they can access (click-through or whatever) but they don't have access to Google search results directly unless Google allow this (which I've not checked but can't imagine they do allow).
The grey area is that Google's ToS relates to their relationship with their clients (people who search using Google), do they disallow their clients if they're using MSIE with tracking? Doubtful, if they did (by a technicality say) then they could sue their clients but they couldn't (a priori) sue MS as MS are acting in good faith in their relationship with the same clients (people using MSIE allowing data tracking). The onus would appear to be on the Google users not to have tracking enabled (if indeed Google's ToS disallow such things).
Why not just grep Bing logs ... well clearly they can tell a lot about the relevance to a particular term by seeing how long a user spends on a page after searching for that term and following a link. If the user bounces then it's not likely to be high quality. This sort of info won't be easily gathered from Bing logs if indeed it is possible to get at at all.
Because what you describe would be underhand and probably a violation of Google's ToS that could cost them very dearly in PR and money (in a court case).
They have access to user data that users say they can access (click-through or whatever) but they don't have access to Google search results directly unless Google allow this (which I've not checked but can't imagine they do allow).
The grey area is that Google's ToS relates to their relationship with their clients (people who search using Google), do they disallow their clients if they're using MSIE with tracking? Doubtful, if they did (by a technicality say) then they could sue their clients but they couldn't (a priori) sue MS as MS are acting in good faith in their relationship with the same clients (people using MSIE allowing data tracking). The onus would appear to be on the Google users not to have tracking enabled (if indeed Google's ToS disallow such things).
Why not just grep Bing logs ... well clearly they can tell a lot about the relevance to a particular term by seeing how long a user spends on a page after searching for that term and following a link. If the user bounces then it's not likely to be high quality. This sort of info won't be easily gathered from Bing logs if indeed it is possible to get at at all.