tedster - 1:38 am on Sep 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

It reeks of favoritism.

Not really, because in the greatest majority of cases there is only an automatic algorithm at work, and there's no human intervention that could be playing favorites. In most case, the algorithm performs pretty amazingly well at getting the specific search to show the unique website. And sometimes, it just goes a bit wonky. Still, earlier on the web sedarch results could be amazingly wonky compared to what we get today.

After all, a search engine just a bunch of mathematics trying to sort out billions of pages - not a human edited effort like a directory.