Though I admit I may only read the first couple hundred and skim about halfway through before closing the tab.
In many cases where they have no other data, they clearly weight Google's single data point high enough to create a whole SERP around it. The claim that 'this is just one input among many' implies that some kind of cross-referencing or corroboration takes place. In this experiment that obviously didn't happen.
This really doesn't tell us anything about how highly it is weighted relative to other data though, since obviously there will be no other data to weigh in on a nonsense search term.
However hand they issued twenty engineers laptops which is more consistent with an ongoing effort than a single afternoon of Bing and beer - particularly when you consider that if there was a single method applied and it was known beforehand, one engineer could have automated the whole exercise.
The inability to accurately measure honeypot injections is a bit odd. As pure speculation, it may be that they were not sure if the methods they used to get Bing to show honeypots number 8 and 9 were legitimate.
Whether they throw up new SERPs in reaction to data from other single sources might be interesting. But if true, it's also not very complimentary.
It's common sense that they are using data from Google. That has pretty much been proven conclusively. Nate Silver telling us this again is not interesting. The possibility that he might try was.
I actually think Silver makes a useful contribution, mainly because of his background and gift for illustrating data perception problems. If you're looking for hard facts and (more) smoking guns then you would naturally be disappointed.
In the case of the honeypot pages, clearly the number is 100%.
In the cases of other results pages, we merely have Google's claim that the similarity has been rising over time, and that they attribute it to info extracted from Google.
Using information that people provide about where they click (hopefully with some kind of informed consent), in order to improve your algorithm, seems reasonable enough. If a large part of the info ended up coming from Google's algorithm, it starts to seems sketchy, and it's legitimate for Google to whinge.
Not that whinging ever stopped any other company, particularly Microsoft, from trying to take advantage of other companies' IP.
With much writing, he essentially says the following:
1. Microsoft's defense contains no information because they don't say how they weight the data learned from Google searches.
2. It's hard to say how Microsoft is actually using the data learned from Google searches.
For the crowd here this is essentially common-sense.
(edit: in point two I changed 'impossible' to 'hard')