Google managed to inject "7 to 9" of their honeypots into Bing. In 91+/100 cases apparently there was enough to outweigh the Google results on gibberish terms despite the efforts of 20 Google engineers between December 17 and December 31.

What were the terms of the other 91 cases? You make it sound like the Google engineers were slaving away for two weeks. My impression was that they ran the experiment during that time.

Google doesn't say how long they were working on it or anything at all about the methods they used. Indeed, they don't even seem to be certain how many honeypots they injected.

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.

While we are all speculating on certain bits of what happened in this she said/he said, I would presume in many/most of those 91 cases what happened wasn't that other inputs outweighed Google's but rather no user running the Bing toolbar (and who had it set to the phone home defaults) took the action which would create the Google-related input to begin with.

My point was that the algorithmic conclusion 'oh well, let's just print it anyway, since it's from Google' is pretty weighty on its own.

While we have no idea why this result is good, Google seems to think it's fine. If it's good enough for google, it's good enough for us.

"Since it's from Google" is an unproven assertion. They may do this for other data sources as well in similar circumstances.

I didn't assert that they don't. I asserted that they only had one data source in that case.

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.