If Google think they have other evidence, let's see it. The burden of proof is on the accuser, I think.
(c/p from other thread.)
(c/p from other thread.)
Content from Google's result database ends up used to generate Bing's results, full stop. Proved. It may be technical error, it may be only used a little bit, it may be deliberate, it may be accidental and perfectly ethical by some people's standards, there's all kinds of ways to legitimately interpret this fact. But Google has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that input from Google is used to generate some non-zero bit of Bing's results. There is absolutely, positively no other explanation that accounts for the facts of the case.
My comment was in reference to that.
I hate to be a bit harsh, but that argument sounds more like spin or rationalization than a logical argument. It sounds nice but it doesn't make sense if you try to actually map it back to the real world, where somebody had to type real code to produce the effect you're hypothesizing, and they weren't writing this code with this debate in mind in advance.
I think they probably have statistics that convince them of the latter, and they should show them, so we can see if people outside Google also find them convincing.