Really glad to see you reply here Matt. Never expected it. Kudos!
I think Microsoft did acknowledge using clickstream data as one of the 1000 signals for their relevance ranking. Now regarding the degree to which they are used, I don't have any internal knowledge of either MSFT or GOOG but from my understanding of how search works, words like "hiybbprqag" couldn't have existed in MSFT's index to return any results. So the only signal that could possibly contribute to the ranking of "hiybbprqag" was the clickstreamm data that was generated by GOOG sting operation. So at least for that query term it must have been a big deciding factor. For the popular query terms, I doubt it's that high. I use both bing and google fairly regulalrly and I can tell that for most typical queries, bing results are comparable to Google but for the tail queries, google does a better job. If they were giving any special weight to google click data then they would have done it for tail queries (which they apparently cannot do as well as google) to improve their relevance there.
Regarding Google specific processing, again bulk of the search activity in US happens in GOOG, so I can imagine a lot of search click data is generated on google.
As for the time, I am not sure why that even matters. From my usage of bing and google over past few months, bing has been consistent in the behaviour. If this was a sudden change, I'd have seen a jusp in bing quality overnight. Don't remember seeing that.
I think Microsoft did acknowledge using clickstream data as one of the 1000 signals for their relevance ranking. Now regarding the degree to which they are used, I don't have any internal knowledge of either MSFT or GOOG but from my understanding of how search works, words like "hiybbprqag" couldn't have existed in MSFT's index to return any results. So the only signal that could possibly contribute to the ranking of "hiybbprqag" was the clickstreamm data that was generated by GOOG sting operation. So at least for that query term it must have been a big deciding factor. For the popular query terms, I doubt it's that high. I use both bing and google fairly regulalrly and I can tell that for most typical queries, bing results are comparable to Google but for the tail queries, google does a better job. If they were giving any special weight to google click data then they would have done it for tail queries (which they apparently cannot do as well as google) to improve their relevance there.
Regarding Google specific processing, again bulk of the search activity in US happens in GOOG, so I can imagine a lot of search click data is generated on google.
As for the time, I am not sure why that even matters. From my usage of bing and google over past few months, bing has been consistent in the behaviour. If this was a sudden change, I'd have seen a jusp in bing quality overnight. Don't remember seeing that.