Sounds like an admission to me

Google's Schmidt, Senators bicker over whether links were 'cooked' | ZDNet: "The early fireworks appeared when Sen. Michael S. Lee (R-UT) produced data that showed that Google’s owned and operated properties often were among the top links. Schmidt said that Google aimed to give answers quickly and sometimes engineering dictated that a stock quote from Google Finance was faster than the “10 links answer.” That rationale from Schmidt also applied to Maps and other areas."

'via Blog this'

Global Online Privacy