Imagine I am the Bing toolbar and I am spying on my users.
The Google search result for fake word zxczxczxczxczx is then a web page with a single link, and the user I am observing is clicking that link. So I am Bing, and I make a connection: zxczxczxczxczx (which appears on this web page) is related to said link.
Since the word is artificial and doesn't appear anywhere else, it's eventually going to produce that page as a search result.
So I think the author is right - what Google has done is they have proven that Bing toolbar tracks what users are doing, and sends the results back to Bing to improve their search.
They have not proven that Bing treats google.com differently from any other page. For that they should have seeded 100 random web pages from different domains with artificial words, and have these pages contain a link which the user with Bing toolbar installed then clicks. I bet that it would yield the same result as the Google test, e.g. those fake words would get matched to the linked web pages.
zxczxczxczxczx isn't on the web page. It's on the search results page, but that page isn't for crawling, by robots.txt. Either MS is ignoring robots.txt, or they're parsing the URLs.
From my reading of the article, zxczxczxczxczx isn't in the search results page either, it was special cased at google to display the honeypot page for that specific query.
But is Bing "parsing the url" any different to what Google's doing when I go into Google Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> Search Engines, and select Keyword in the second dropdown (after source)? Google are clearly showing me the search terms parsed out of the referrer urls from people who found my site in Bing.
I think this is perhaps not obvious behaviour to the general public, but surely pretty much anyone who goes to the trouble of installing the Bing (or Google) toolbar has worked out for themselves that they're choosing to send data like this to Microsoft (and Google), and that it'll get used to "improve search" if it's found to be useful for that?
Imagine I am the Bing toolbar and I am spying on my users.
The Google search result for fake word zxczxczxczxczx is then a web page with a single link, and the user I am observing is clicking that link. So I am Bing, and I make a connection: zxczxczxczxczx (which appears on this web page) is related to said link.
Since the word is artificial and doesn't appear anywhere else, it's eventually going to produce that page as a search result.
So I think the author is right - what Google has done is they have proven that Bing toolbar tracks what users are doing, and sends the results back to Bing to improve their search.
They have not proven that Bing treats google.com differently from any other page. For that they should have seeded 100 random web pages from different domains with artificial words, and have these pages contain a link which the user with Bing toolbar installed then clicks. I bet that it would yield the same result as the Google test, e.g. those fake words would get matched to the linked web pages.