What's the deal with Google authority sites?

I noticed one of my sites has those little links under it when in comes up in Google's results. Are authority sites picked manually by some one at Google? How can I take advantage of the little links?

 

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/information-about-sitelinks.html

 

Please note - google never uses the phrase 'authority site'

 

Simply means best result for that search term.

 

That is completely not true.

The sitelinks do not change, no matter what the search query. The only way to change them is to remove them in webmaster tools.