That information gathering is opt-in, so it isn't quite as big of a deal. My guess is that Microsoft wanted to improve their search results by seeing what users actually clicked on for a search. They thought "well, we get some good data from seeing what they click on when they search on Bing, but we can get *vastly more* data if we also gather what people click on for other search engines". That is, I'm not convinced their intent was to specifically take results from Google, but rather to get metrics on what their users found to be relevant results, no matter their preferred search engine. However, when the search terms didn't previously exist, the actions of a few gave more importance to these metrics than was warranted, and essentially imported Google's data since having some result was better than having no result.