Right, and Froogle was the best shopping service in 2004. That's why we all still shop on Froogle to this day.

The actual Earth is, arguably, a bit better, imo.

Weird, I typically get websites in my search results, how do I enable celestial bodies?

Key word in your statement being “maybe”. No one knows for sure if they’re exploiting their advantages or not. That’s really the biggest issue: the lack of transparency. I think if companies want to participate in their own marketplaces, they need to be required to publish all data they have that could potentially give them an edge. This obviously isn’t possible in many cases, so companies will just not go through the trouble.

I don’t think that was their point. Why is Google Earth ranked higher than, oh I dunno, Earth?

Google earth is just one more website about the earth, and you can't get the real thing through your tiny tubes. If more people searching for earth want to use that website to explore the real earth rather than say, read the wikipedia article about the earth (and most obviously more people use GE than visit that one page on the wiki), it is correct for it to be ranked higher according to most typical search algorithms. OPs point is perfectly valid, it's just not a great example.