To be honest I always thought that this practice (Google intentionally ranking its own properties higher than competitors) was going to be the one the US finall

To be honest I always thought that this practice (Google intentionally ranking its own properties higher than competitors) was going to be the one the US finally sued google over. Google said that its own properties ranked higher because they were higher quality, but I saw many instances where that was clearly not true, making me suspect there was a twiddler that up-ranked google properties for specific categories of searches like restaurant reviews, flights, and mobile apps.