By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

When Microsoft announced its July 2009 search deal with Yahoo, and even before, Steve Ballmer said the increased scale would help improve the quality of Bing search results. Perhaps Microsoft's CEO was wrong, or Yahoo search didn't give enough scale. Bing started serving up Yahoo search results late last year. But Bing also is serving up Google results, as was widely reported yesterday. How desperate is that -- or is it, gasp, clever?

To briefly, recap: Yesterday morning, at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reported that "Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google's results, then uses that information to improve Bing's own search listings. Bing doesn't deny this." They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but c`mon, what's right about this and wrong with the math behind Microsoft's search