Not sure where you get the "one step removed" bit. It is a content farm, at least in the places where it isn't simply copies of Wikipedia or autogenerated text.
The results may be directly measured but they are not real time. Click on the 7 Day view and you can see that the latest numbers are from Feb 22, before the change was rolled out. You would have to wait until Sunday or Monday, I would think, before seeing the difference.
Actually, I was wrong. The results are US only, so (for now, anyways) you can view what the results looked like before the update by changing the language parameter (&hl=) or the &gl= parameter in the url. For instance, pre-algo rankings (Mahalo #1):
kalvin, there would be no way to do that unless you were prepared and happened to store the queries beforehand. However, if you take a look at the Alexa page for one of the sites in question you can see what some of the top queries were that used to bring those sites traffic, and then manually go see where they rank now. For instance, Mahalo used to be in the #1 spot for many of the queries listed on it's page:
If you look now though you can see they are at #5 for [mcdonalds coupons] (which is still higher than they deserve), #6 for [how to play guitar], more than 5 pages deep for [bed bath and beyond], etc. Check ehow.com and you can see similar results no longer ranking:
Ok, I know no one is going to see this, but in looking for this thread I just discovered that the original one I was discussing is now showing up in the "Popular" list, albeit at #147 (5 votes in 10 hours). So obviously if anything was going on earlier, it's been reversed. It's even outranking this thread.
And, of course, I just realized - if it is a moratorium on discussing HN itself, then there is a chance that this post will never get seen (or answered) either...
This sort of question and paranoid conspiracy-mongering would probably not come up as much if articles simply had a visible down-vote instead of the hidden down-vote applied when people flag an article (but not early enough to kill it).
When you say #38 you mean this discussion and not the article that someone submitted today, correct? Is that what you think happened then, it was simply voted down? Who would be able to confirm or deny it then? I just went through all 690 submissions visible from the homepage onward and didn't see the one someone submitted today at all. You would think it would show up somewhere in that list, wouldn't you?
This makes a lot of sense, and would have be easy enough for Google to test as well, creating some tiny, brand new, never before heard of test search engine that Bing would have no reason to copy, see if the same thing happened.
edit: I'm not even sure if it's only search engines that are being analysed by Bing or all pages, but it's possible that it is just SEs - they could be capturing query terms distinctly.
Also, why did the experiment succeed for only 6 or 7 of the 100 terms that they tried? There's more than what meets the eye here, regardless of the hype and everyone jumping on the bandwagon.
