Thanks. There are honestly some much more important things going on in the world right now, so that doesn't bother me too much.
It did bother me a lot that people were happy to "put the boot" in on Microsoft based on pretty slim evidence, and without much level of criticial thinking. I'm not really a Microsoft fan, but the whole thing felt a lot like confirmation bias to me.
To answer your questions:
1) I'm guessing so. I'd wager that you might even be able to run a similar experiment to Google's Bing experiment (on a different host), and see the result turn up in Google's search index after a while.
2) I was wondering that, too. I might check it out tonight.
A couple possibly interesting followups:
1) If one was to use the Google Toolbar, would it send similar data?
2) Are links to and from https pages tracked any differently?