Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...