outland88 - 9:56 pm on Jul 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

For example, for many years there has been a special "Mom & Pop boost" to help small business compete with the big guys.

That would have to be insider information because I see nothing to validate that proposition. They might give a boost to Adsense or Adwords if that is what you are you are referring to. In fact it is contradictory to the argument of relevant results and alludes to the possibility Google is deciding your fate outside of the area of content. Then again I never argued the natural results weren’t bought in the first place, in the broad sense. Once Google seeds the first two pages you could mangle the rest of the results and never know the difference. In fact wasn’t it Eric Scmidt who proclaimed “we envision the day when the searcher will never really have to search outside of the first few results to find what they want.” Isn’t that a small business killer to begin with?