Why does that matter? They're only "stealing" results from Google insofar as people (/Google employees) used Google in order to illustrate what pages they want returned given a certain search query. I have a sneaking suspicion that the exact same thing would have happened if they were in the position to do the same query bombing on Ask Jeeves or crappywebsearch.net as it did for Google.
Search engines to me are an obvious case of a means to an end. If a search engine better than Google were to come out tomorrow I would switch to it (from Google) instantly with no regrets. Google's sense of propriety about their results (or, more accurately, what users clicked on after searching via Google), especially given the fact that they are well-known for their penchant for sucking in user data like a black hole (not that I care-- I want them to use it if it means better searches), to me seems 9 parts hypocritical and 1 part prima donna.
Need people be reminded that this is the same company that "accidentally" logged users' WiFi browsing habits while driving StreetView cars around Europe? Give me a break. Everyone is guilty, and no one is going to do anything differently now than they did before.
It matters because if you use your main competitors results and ranking to change your results and ranking, you can no longer claim you are original, innnovative or better. It just taints everything you did.
They didn't use either. Certainly not the ranking. Also, you're obviously better if you do-- in fact, you're better by definition. :) (innovative and original, perhaps not so much)
Why does the user's click from the results page suddenly belong to Google (apart from the fact that in this specific case they actually artificially created a fake long-tail result)? If I Google Bing, and then Bing's ranking of Bing goes up a a result (not that it's not already #1, but whatever), can you actually say that it's Google's result and ranking? What if it's nytimes, or any number of extraordinarily common searches where you're really just doing a domain lookup for a name you already know?
What if I didn't click on anything until the 30th page of results because that was the only useful result, and it causes the Bing rank to go higher? Does Google have any ownership over the rank then, even if the useful page was ranked lower than much more useful results? Couldn't Google then just return a list of every page on the internet in response to every query and then claim that their results are being stolen?
To be honest, I'm not really convinced that either side is in the right here. I just think that it should be made clear that there is a large distinction between stealing results and tracking clickthrough behavior. One would be laughably shortsided and of dubious ethics, the other is basically common practice, and is being made a bit more than it is because of its superficial appearance.
They use results for terms users entered to Google to crawl pages that are not in their index (torsorophy example which is not an artificial one) therefore enriching their index based on google's results, incresing their depth.
As for ranking, it is more blurry, but When you record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking, it starts stinking.
Search engines to me are an obvious case of a means to an end. If a search engine better than Google were to come out tomorrow I would switch to it (from Google) instantly with no regrets. Google's sense of propriety about their results (or, more accurately, what users clicked on after searching via Google), especially given the fact that they are well-known for their penchant for sucking in user data like a black hole (not that I care-- I want them to use it if it means better searches), to me seems 9 parts hypocritical and 1 part prima donna.
Need people be reminded that this is the same company that "accidentally" logged users' WiFi browsing habits while driving StreetView cars around Europe? Give me a break. Everyone is guilty, and no one is going to do anything differently now than they did before.