How major search engines deal with rel="nofollow" tag

As we know that nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. This is very general idea about nofollow tag but do you know how does search engines deal with this.Here are the approaches of various search engines on nofollow tag.

Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link.That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).Links with "nofollow" are included in the backlinks reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central.

Yahoo : If Yahoobot find a link they make it available to their algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.

Ask.com : Ask have never officially supported No Follow, so this doen't apply to thier crawler/ranking.

Msn:Msn respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
This images is based on official statements of the search engines.

Sources :1 & 2. Image credit goes to first source.

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