I find this disturbing in all sorts of ways. It shows that engineers at any search company not only *can* fiddle with results, but at times when they find it convenient or funny (or perhaps in other instances, good for their business in some way) they *will.* Not a good precedent, in my humble opinion.
UPDATE: Google called me to inform me that they did not fiddle back in 1999, that the “evil” query back then returned MSFT on its own…not surprisingly…also MSFT posts on its blog that the initial results that brought Google to #1 for “more evil than satan” were a MSFTbomb, ie, not an inside job. Well, at least, not an official inside job…