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 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.