that says they didn't copy results by looking at google directly, but by watching users that use google.
With the number of IE users, the difference is only in how they achieved it, not whether they did it.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be "If I was playing golf with you and I took 6 strokes for a hole, would you be offended if I called that a hole-in-one?"
I was promised something by the (outrageously) surprising claim in the headline and the article could not remotely keep up... and this was the first analogy that came to my mind - in both cases something was promised but then not fulfilled.