Don't be so harsh, I think Eric is onto something. Or do you think it is normal, that for the "NY Chiropractor" search, first 7 "organic" results are listed in Places, while all the rest are not? That's clearly a bias and now we see the search results are not sorted by relevance, as Google always claimed to be the case.

You assume it's a bias, but you provide no compelling argument that the results on the first page aren't the best results for the query. And neither does the Tech Crunch writer.

No kidding.

Searched for: "ny chiropractor". First page results: all NYC chiropractors. Seems like accurate, relevant results to me. Meanwhile, the first 4 Bing results are: a college, an association, an actual NYC chiropractor, and a Wikipedia page about the college.

I find the high-rank-due-to-emphasis-on-online-presence theory far more likely, actually. Especially as they seem to be targeting Google SEO.

Even if the theory that "smart webmasters use Google tools" is true, this indicates that Google is creating products that make it easier to gamble the system. This doesn't sound like it is helping web users, just the opposite.

> the search results are not sorted by relevance

I don't think it's safe to assume that enrollment into places has no effect on real-world relevance.