edit - feel free to delete this as I just spotted MrMackin had already posted the same story here: http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/wsj-how-google-skewed-search-results/
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I missed this last week, but a very interesting (though lengthy) read:
http://marketingland.com/highlights-of-the-ftc-staff-report-on-google-antitrust-investigation-122724
Some highlights
http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html
- Google weakening their organic results to drive users into their own vertical offerings - hinting at strategic algorithm changes to demote whole verticals
- Maneuvering to prevent Bing reaching a useful critical mass of query volume
- Using data scraped from amazon to order its own product results