I think it would be rather short sited of Google to start getting into wars over permissions for mining clickstream data from the source page, given the amount

I think it would be rather short sited of Google to start getting into wars over permissions for mining clickstream data from the source page, given the amount of data mining they do on Gmail links and search result links etc. I can imagine a reverse sting operation Bing could run: 1) Set up similar faked honeypot pages that only Bing knows about. 2) Send emails to Gmail accounts owned by the Bing management team. 3) Click on a few of those links. 4) Watch as Google mines the clicks and ends up with the links in their search index. 5) Sit back and accuse Google of reading private emails from Bing management to improve their search results. It's exactly the same thing, the data is owned by the user, and in both cases the user will have agreed to a terms and conditions that allows the companies to collect stats from that data.