Google is pretty innovative, actually it is very innovative and despiter having some obscene amounts of money to throw at projects a lot of good comes out of what they are doing. The latest Google “toy” that I am playing with is Google Suggestion Labs the idea is simple…..you are now too thick to search properly so we will make suggestions as to what you search for. You start typing and Google guesses what you are looking for and (usefully) tells how many matches it is likely to find. Very clever.
Except. It could “serve” you prefered answers from such sources as (gasp) commercial partners and advertisers. I noticed when I searched for Playstation 3 the first real prompt was in fact “Play.com” a well-known e-boutique selling, amongst other things, Playstation bits. Play.com had only 1 match but the entry beneath had (the word Play by itself) had 196 million matches. Ah, I here you say - it’s clever and showing the one with the least matches as that (quite rightly) would produce a better match should you stop typing there…..except that when I continued to type “Playst” it then gave me Playstation 3 (15m matches) above Playstation Portable (4m matches).
I am sure that true to form Google will also keep this algorithm secret and periodically update it so that once the SEO spammer brigade has sussed it out (ruining it for everyone) they can change it again and hurt hard-working regular sites that stay within the guidelines.