tedster - 8:54 pm on Sep 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

just wonder if it's partly a response to complaints from big corporations and/or advertisers.

The lawsuit they lost was brought by a very small business.

Anyway, it's apparently a manual intervention, therefore a departure from Google's philosophy of letting everything be determined by algorithms.

Not exactly - I'm sure it's still a change to the algorithm that determines what Suggestions to use. there was a flaw or edge case in the original heuristic that wasn't well-accounted for at first.

And it could lead to more censorship in the future.

Yes, that's the potential that makes me shudder. Google's whole direction of spoon-feeding the general user (instead of asking them to mature) is dangerous. It is not healthy for the general population to INCREASE their dependency on any authority whatsoever.