yes...but all those stories would have boosted GoDaddy by quite a bit in rankings in Google

My guess is that this change is temporary and that someone at GoDaddy is calling their Google rep...and we'll see a fix shortly.

GoDaddy actually uses Adwords(and they rank #1...so they spend the most)...NameCheap doesn't appear to be(at least for the domain name search term). And they have a valid claim for being the biggest domain registrar...so Google loses nothing by playing the game and getting them to rank higher