Wouldn't that have required an insane amount of infrastructure? Infrastructure that they could have used to crawl... anything else?

    They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.

That's very funny.

How many billions did they spend doing this? And they still haven't caught up.