[jonathanyc]

Your comment has essentially zero content. If you have a genuine interest in making an argument rather than just an interest in making a post for people who agree with you before reading the article to upvote you, you should provide some actual points.

Google has an immense lobbying arm; the linked article discloses how Google funds a lot of public policy research that happens to agree with its positions. It's either disingenuous or naive to argue that professors won't be influenced to support Google's positions when it's unlikely Google will continue to fund researchers who start to disagree with them.

It would be rather frightening if we found out that tobacco companies had funded hundreds of studies into whether tobacco is healthy (oh, wait), regardless of whether or not the outcome were predetermined, just because any reasonable person can see that there will be a conflict of interest.

Why are we so willing to assume that one corporation whose only interest is profit is so different from another?