The context of that article is important, too.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt is testifying next Wednesday before a U.S. Senate antitrust committee.

The committee is looking into whether Google favors its own sites, like Finance and Maps, in its search results, and whether this might violate fair competition laws.

I guess they missed this, but I think some of this is important, as well...

This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

[infolab.stanford.edu...]

Wow - that's a quote from the original paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". Page and Brin were pointing a fingeer at the very practice that some people now accuse them of.

Thought you'd seen that one years ago Ted ..that's why Eric was sent in..to help them see the "light" and how things work in the real world, outside of academia and idealistic philosophies..

I would imagine it was either hope they learned and came around to seeing things the big boys way ..or have to stifle Google ..which many would doubtless at the time rather assimilate into the machine that was and try to morph it into the thing it has become..

Eric appears to have been successful..and is now occupied with smoothing the path..

Google or Bing in search ( for now ) and Google or facebook in "social" ..as with many things, I think we will only be offered / allowed ;-) the choice between two or more "evils" ..the trick will be to identify accurately the "lesser"...( at the time )...and try to avoid finding ourselves with only one.

However anyone who puts their faith in governments of any political colour saving us from either ..is naive..there will be at best gestures for the crowd to be able to feel that something has been done..and the machine will continue..

We will all accommodate to this ..as everyone has always done..long before the internet ..