[Dysart]

Esoteric indeed, but illuminating just the same. As for whether or not Google routinely skews search results as you wonder, only al-gor-ithm knows and he ain’t talking.

[JSteff]

whether or not Google routinely skews search results as you wonder,

Makes you think the are running it like a news station or a book making operation. "Hey guys we dot a bidder on the keyword "XXX" and they are bidding $$$ for us to make baby cats show up on all searches for "cute kids"....should we take it or give the false keyword "cure kids" search result to "dogs vomiting?" (Ought to be a hoot).

And so the next 20 pages of search cute kids will now show as pages of dogs vomiting.
Can you see the problems that would cause??? Quite a conundrum. If Google can't be trusted, who can?