I don't think anything about this is clear-cut. I can imagine a very simple algorithm, as follows:
* When query Q gets made more than N times at bing.com,
* Mine clickstream data for the next M urls requested after searches for Q
* Any url that appears more than T times (possibly spread across some number of users) is presumed to have been found relevant to Q, and derived either from later searches (corrected spelling) or curated sites or other search engines. Add to mapping of valid responses to Q.
It's not a very good algorithm, of course, and if you have any other source of information about Q you're probably better off using that instead. But it or something like it could explain the torsorophy example and every other part of Google's narrative, and it's not particularly suspicious or questionable, and it certainly doesn't involve targeting Google.
It doesn't matter, because the results (from the honeypot) had nothing to do with the searches, so it would have been impossible to clue Bing in directly by searching on Bing a lot.
Are you claiming that they made the queries without actually making the queries? Reread the first line of my algorithm: once you identify a query Q as more than just a one-off mistake—whether it's an actual new item or a common misspelling or, maybe, a trap—then you decide it's worth looking into.
Put another way, it's impossible not to clue Bing in on at least the fact that you are making these searches.
That is exactly what's being claimed. The queries were not made on bing.com, they were made on google.com. The only way Bing can become aware of the results of these google.com queries is if they're "spying" on the user's activity via the Bing Toolbar and IE8 suggested search features.
"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, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above)."
* When query Q gets made more than N times at bing.com,
* Mine clickstream data for the next M urls requested after searches for Q
* Any url that appears more than T times (possibly spread across some number of users) is presumed to have been found relevant to Q, and derived either from later searches (corrected spelling) or curated sites or other search engines. Add to mapping of valid responses to Q.
It's not a very good algorithm, of course, and if you have any other source of information about Q you're probably better off using that instead. But it or something like it could explain the torsorophy example and every other part of Google's narrative, and it's not particularly suspicious or questionable, and it certainly doesn't involve targeting Google.