Well look, this thing comes preinstalled with Windows, so all the Google engineers did is go to www.google.com on IE, search for something and - voila a short time later the results are on bing.com.
Automated spidering or not, the way this is setup borders on the edge of stealing. I can see why they feel the need to complain about the issue.
We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
Essentially, the engineers enabled the user tracking features of IE and the Bing Toolbar, ultimately seeding Bing with the desired results. How is that stealing?
On a related note, can this technique be exploited to improve site ranking on Bing?
> On a related note, can this technique be exploited to improve site ranking on Bing?
That was my thought when I heard of all this! I don't know what kind of authentication the bing toolbar does, but this seems ripe for reverse engineering, then pumping fraudulent data to Microsoft through a botnet...
Automated spidering or not, the way this is setup borders on the edge of stealing. I can see why they feel the need to complain about the issue.