I thought this was already made fairly clear, but Google has said again that it does not use Bing data to influence its search results, the way Bing apparently uses Google data to influence it’s search results.
Danny Sullivan has dug into this topic again, and got some new quotes from Google fellow Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithm and who wrote a post slamming Bing for its practices after the whole debacle went down.
"Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation," he said.
Singhal told Sullivan, "We absolutely do not use search activity on other search engines to influence our search results."
That doesn’t mean Google doesn’t see what’s happening on Bing and other search engines, as Sullivan points out, but Google is sticking to its story of not using that information to influence search ranking.
Google will evidently be making improvements to its disclosure process, which is somewhat ironic, considering that was a big part of Matt Cutts’ argument when he and Bing’s Harry Shum argued about the whole thing on stage at a recent search event.