[whiletruefork]

Matt Cutts should know better. Being part of '1000 signals' does not mean all signals are weighted evenly. It does not even mean the signals are weighted the same across all query types. This is machine learning - the actual weighting is learned and dynamic (always shifting) and not controlled. And there is absolutely no reason for Microsoft to take out a particular signal just because Google asked. There needs to be proof of unethical behavior, of which there is none.

The Chrome and Gmail EULA's are as bad as the IE8 Suggested Sites bit mentioned in this article. GMail basically reads your email to provide contextually relevant ads. Does my mom know that? No.

Not a plug, but I blogged about this @ http://roshank.posterous.com/google-versus-bing-no-one-is-be... . I believe this should be a discussion on ethics - and feel it is ethical for a company to do whatever it wants with data contained in its own software application.

[andrewljohnson]

I don't think you read the whole article, because Matt quotes Nate Silver in saying that exact thing

You said: " -Being part of '1000 signals' does not mean all signals are weighted evenly."

Matt quotes Nate: "First, not all of the inputs are necessarily equal. It could be, for instance, that the Google results are weighted so heavily that they are as important as the other 999 inputs combined."

[ac2u]

"It could be" is not evidence.