The part that seems interesting to me is that Google scrapes other entities' data (Reader, News, Books, Scholar) in dozens of other ways, and that behaviour is generally regarded as totally justifiable.
Well, perhaps Microsoft thinks its business involves providing value to their customers rather than its competitors. What seems consistently missing from the Google PR campaign has been how Microsoft's behavior is a bad thing for the user.
Bing's increasing market share is presumably already due to providing value. If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft", do you think that's going to make people less inclined to try Bing?
>how is Microsoft's alleged behavior harming the user?
It's not harming Bing's users to provide Google's results. What's in it for Google to help Bing's users? It's not as if Google is an NPO humanitarian effort to help people find the information they seek.
>If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft"
Obscure misspelled words are just one thing that Bing is able to get better results on thanks to this. They also benefit from every other kind of query that a user can make on Google.
or how some publishers felt about Google Books when it launched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Copyright_infringe...
The evidence suggests Bing is scraping clickstream data to work out where its users go and where they stay, and this includes google search URLs with embedded queries. The evidence doesn't seem to suggest that Bing treats google any differently to any other URL on the web.
So, the questions could come down to: who has the right to disseminate URL strings and mine them for valuable information? Which seems not indirectly related to "who has the right to digitise other forms of media and mine them for valuable information?"