From googles mouth
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
"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.
We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results"
In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.
I guess I just have trouble seeing it taking more than about 3 minutes before 20 of the top industry engineers figured out a way to automate the process. Which is pretty long compared to the 2 seconds it would take for them to start thinking of ways to improve the SEO.
It's the human factor in Google's "experiment" that just doesn't fit. If they wanted a controlled approach, they would have written an application and run it and logged everything. Instead, it appears that they provided laptops so that the engineers could experiment and innovate their way to exploiting the Bing toolbar.
Thanks - that's what I've been getting at. This isn't data entry into the Bing toolbar, it's into a non-Bing page when one has the toolbar installed.
This is not correct. From Google:
"We asked these engineers to enter the queries into the search box on the Google home page"
Google did not enter the data into the IE search box.
Edit: I see you replied to yourself acknowledging the mistake - please ignore this then!
Got a citation for that?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...