This shows the author doesn’t have a fundamental understanding that Google Search and Ads teams are different: “ while search engines do have an incentive to somewhat distort the information retrieval process in favor of their paying advertisers there has to be some baseline quality - otherwise users will stop bothering, and usage and with it profits will go down.”

Yes there may (likely?) be backchannel off the record conversations between Google search engineers and executives at companies, but that’s more limited and not at scale. Google’s not (likely) giving organic ranking preferences to Dick’s Sporting Goods because they advertise via AdWords.

There may be lunch chats between Pinterest and Google engineers, however.