Recently, Google began to play too cruel. They fight only for the sake of seo to increase their income with google advords. Close the services that are not profitable enough. Did google APPS paid and very expensive. Malengie stifle companies and start-ups. Google became a businessman at first appears to us in quite a different face. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sad.
They are just trying to earn more and more - like all of use. I would call it greedy instead of sneaky, but you have quite a good point that they are trying to ruin SEO, in means, which they themselves define in order to get some more funds from adwords, hence stock share pricing and so on and so on.... Don't be sad, just fight it ! That's the way it goes with SEO - we try to manipulate their results, and they are manipulating them further in order to prevent us to do so, but mostly to display their own ads instead of genuine results... Still I guess all of this has some point of a limit, when not only webmasters or IM-rs will realize exactly how ridiculous are google's SE results at the moment....