I'm about 80% in the "Nothing fishy here" camp on this issue, but you have pointed out the 20% very well right here. Obviously they won't explain the first one

I'm about 80% in the "Nothing fishy here" camp on this issue, but you have pointed out the 20% very well right here. Obviously they won't explain the first one, just as Google won't explain the specifics of why StackOverflow scrapers sometimes outrank StackOverflow, and for good reason. Explaining the specifics of the mechanism would open it wide to spammers. The second? Yeah, that's the million-dollar question. They should answer that. Definitely. It touches on the smelliest thing about the issue. If I had a search engine (I don't), and I wanted to copy Google's results (I wouldn't), and I had the ability to collect user click data, I could use that click data to create plausible deniability for the copying. This is exactly the sort of thing Microsoft has done in the past on other issues. The third? It's certainly relevant, but I doubt Google would be willing to tell me how its results would be different if it didn't use a specific metric.