[Pearls Before Swine]

Despicable behavior, but perhaps legal. Theft of trade secrets? Maybe not--they're publicly available.

I wonder if Google could respond by conditioning their search on the incoming requester's address. Either send garbage, or refuse and log.

[K1avg]

I doubt it. If they tried that, it would slow Google's famously-quick searches considerably, surely have some bugs and lock out a few users, and take a significant amount of resources to execute.

And, above all that, M$ could just proxy their bot, foiling the whole scheme, and both would be thrown into a game of hide-and-go-seek, which would be counterproductive for BOTH sides.

Typical M$ behavior, IMO, but, AFAIK, technically legal. Oh, well...I'm sticking with Google.

[Paridel]

Knowing google, they will see this as some type of challenge, and I imagine will quickly respond in some fashion.

However I'm hoping for something a little more interesting than just taking on garbage, maybe replacing the content with anti-MS diatribes?

-paridel