This is on par with
They lied. They were caught.
Do not trust Udi Manber.
Do not trust Matt Cutts.
DO NOT TRUST GOOGLE.
The Lie was told here by Udi Manber, and repeated by Matt Cutts. And I quote:
They can and do manually change their search results. They can and do manually put whoever they want at number one: regardless of what they have said in the past.
They are bold face liars.
real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:
There is no way to reconcile those two statements. If Google sees someone at number 4 that they want at number 1, they can remove the number 4 result with their manual spam filter,
shure headphone,
Search Engine Optimization - AboutUs Wiki Page, and then manually insert it to number 1.
This is not nitpicking: they have the capability and they have used it. They have used it more than for legality or for spam,
Free SEO Tools & Search Engine Optimization Software, they used it at the very least for their recent PR stunt.
'At Google we do not manually change results. For example,
Drupal SEO Hands-On Training - Eventbrite, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm-we have to go and actually change the algorithm.
Contrast that with the story from 2 days ago from the official Google Blog: