Wow, I'm surprised by all the developers on Microsofts side on this one. Google spends a lot of money developing proprietary algorithms for determining search results. Microsoft is then stepping in and taking advantage of the money Google spent by copying some of their results. It's rather like someone taking the results of a Consumer Reports list and publishing it themselves. It borders on illegal, and it's definitely shady.
But what I think is more important is all of the flak that Google has been catching for supposedly slipping in its quality of search results. If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results? It's a great method of striking back at the negative PR they've been receiving.
"If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results?"
Bing is apparently using toolbar click data (AFAICT it hasn't been shown that this is specifically targeted at Google or even at search engines in general) when it has no other information for the given search term. That has very little relation to the quality of Google's search in general.
But what I think is more important is all of the flak that Google has been catching for supposedly slipping in its quality of search results. If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results? It's a great method of striking back at the negative PR they've been receiving.