Actually, unless I'm mistaken, parsing the URL may well yield good search terms, but the query string is much less likely. Look at eg HN -- you'd parse out id = some long number. I may be wrong, but I don't recall many sites that would have good information for a search engine in that string.
What seems far more likely is bing is using click tracking on G's results. This was explicitly not denied by their VP on the search engine panel today. If not many sites except search engines have useful keywords in the query string, that pretty much validates Google's complaint.
In fact, if you go to Google's blogpost [1], the bing toolbar specifically calls out monitoring "the searches you do, the websites you visit, [...]" [1]. And the MS guy doesn't deny using clicks on G's search results [2]. In fact, the pretty much just says they copy G on long tail searches.
> I don't recall many sites that would have good information for a search engine in that string.
Well, Google is one such site - as in, if you have bing toolbar installed and are on google.com/search?q=keyword and click on example.com, then Bing can easily extract "google com search q keyword" and associate it with example.com - without anything explicitly or intentionally relating to Google in their code.
What seems far more likely is bing is using click tracking on G's results. This was explicitly not denied by their VP on the search engine panel today. If not many sites except search engines have useful keywords in the query string, that pretty much validates Google's complaint.
In fact, if you go to Google's blogpost [1], the bing toolbar specifically calls out monitoring "the searches you do, the websites you visit, [...]" [1]. And the MS guy doesn't deny using clicks on G's search results [2]. In fact, the pretty much just says they copy G on long tail searches.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
[2] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...