Matt Cutts – Google+ – Sorry that it took me until now to comment on the situation….
This whole story is kind of weird. I’ve only been watching on the periphery, but the background gist is this:
From what I understand, it all starts here, an article outlining an example of Google violating it’s own guidelines against paid link listings. The usual result for this action is either a time-based penalty or outright banning.
Yesterday, a follow-up post was published illustrating that yes, Chrome was in fact undergoing various changes regarding where it would show up for certain search queries.
Long story short: searches for “Chrome” resulted in links pointing toward the support docs on support.google.com and searches for “browser” found links to Chrome falling as low as the 73rd result. Very interesting.
A short time later, Matt Cutts provided a more official response to the situation explaining a bit more from behind the scenes, and also divulging that http://www.google.com/chrome will be demoted for at least 60 days.
Weird stuff, man.