Hi Just a thought: is Google promoting Adsense successful websites? say you have a website performing well with Adsense: it'd be in Google's bets interest to have that website ranking well in the search pages, wouldn't it? Okay, comments: bring them on!
I think the OP's point is to do with Google's interest in seeing to it that the sites doing well with Adsense get more traffic. Makes sense but a company like Google would not need to do it because: 1. They have too much at stake in terms of reputation to resort to these tactics 2. A huge percentage of sites have implemented Adsense - so Google does not need to promote one website over another.
They sort-of promote a few sucessful sites in their Adsense Success Case Study page ( mine is one of them ), but I dont think they would ever promote them by sending extra traffic to them.. I think the Google Search division and the Google Adsense division have a big wall between them, and they probably arent allow to talk to each other for fear of conflict of interest issues..
I agree the ramifications of such an action would nto be in Google's best interest. Since most of their revenue is derived from Adwords then I don't tihnk they would take the chance.
If google gives more traffic to adsense sites, then everybody do this equation... More Adsense Sites = More Google Traffic