[brudgers]

Regardless of the rationale, Google's willingness to manually manipulate page rank for the sake of PR doesn't make a positive impression on me. There was the appearance that Google was gaming SE results, publicly doing so does not seem like a very convincing argument that Google is above such practices.

In other words, I am not inclined to bestow accolades upon them for making real the concerns which were raised.

[zobzu]

Well, at least they kind try to fix it, or, make it appear like so.

But yeah, it's like praising someone saying "ok, ill stop murdering people now", on a much lower level of course. (specially after being slapped on the wrist)

[brudgers]

Google didn't say, "We will stop manipulating search results."

Instead, they said, "We were manipulating search results, and therefore we are so sorry, we are going to manipulate search results."

Promoting Chrome through the manipulation of search results was not the root problem. It was merely a symptom. Manipulating page rank for their own benefit is the problem, and that is their proposed solution.

It came only after the manipulation came to light and does not appear to be part of a larger project to end all manipulation for their benefit.