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I really hope there is nobody that is really surprised at this.

Google does the same thing by the way.

"Google does the same thing by the way."

Proof?

Any kind of link to any google product. You don't need to be a genius to see that the pagerank of plenty of those links is inflated.

There's more and more of these in the regular search results as well, it used to be a lot easier to tell these from the real results.

Being evil is not a 1:0 proposition, there are degrees.

EDIT:

In case you don't believe me:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q=condoleezza+...

For me the fourth result is a youtube link, I find it hard to believe that the pagerank of those youtube pages is higher than the ones preceding it.

Especially since there seem to be more of them that conveniently fit side by side.

That is very bad example. The youtube results are relevant to the query. In bing the results were not relevant and is skewed against the competitors.

Also google is trying to make the results page more rich by including images and video results. I can't believe that you find it sinister and equivalent to bing's dirty trick.

Microsoft it seems is determined never to learn.

Modifying pagerank to benefit your own site is on par with what microsoft does in my book, we simply disagree on that.

Both Microsoft and Google should let their algorithms make up the search pages, not their marketing department. Any kind of preferential treatment for their own content is bad. How bad is just a matter of degree.

The google bit was only a sample, similar things have happened with content related to google books, wikipedia (also when it wasn't the best resource on the web for that theme) and so on.

Search should be clean. People trust that you don't meddle with the results.