There are three things going on here, one of which is probably bad and the others pretty normal.
- humans ranking results: these are called evals and Google has been doing them for at least 15 years. It used to be that there were a sort of "golden" set of manually ranked queries and results, and any change in the search algo would run against them to make sure nothing broke. My guess is over time, as the algorithm became less heuristic and more AI-driven, these sets are instead used to train the models.
- blacklisting of misinformation or spam: as a user, I appreciate this. As a citizen, I'd rather not trust Google as the arbiter of truth, but I generally think they've made good choices here (vs other tech companies). Until society has solved this problem (through regulation or otherwise) I'm OK with this.
- giving advice or favors to advertisers: this is messed up. And will be hard to argue that if they do it for advertisers they don't also (anti-competitively) do it for their other internal properties.
