To make this research more interesting I'd like to see:
1) repeated queries from the same user. Do the results stay constant over time or do they change?
2) comparisons to the same experiment run against e.g. Bing or DuckDuckGo.
It seems to me that some variation in results is to be expected because of users hitting different backends which might be at different stages of index rollouts. Similarly, response times of different backends matter. If for example the video results don't come back in time you'll end up not having them in the result set.
Lastly, the insinuation of the article is that "unbiased" search results are clearly preferable. I'm not convinced. I for one like that STD for me is associated with the C++ standard namespace (which I search for all the time) rather than sexually transmitted diseases (which I luckily don't have to care about as much).
> What the NSA has are three things: a lot of relatively intelligent and highly skilled people working for it;
Do they though? I have sometimes wondered about this. In order to work for the NSA you have to make a lot of sacrifices. You have to be a US citizen. You have to pass a background check. You have to be contend with a government salary. You may never talk about your job (how does that look on a resume if you ever want to apply somewhere else? Prior experience: classified). You have to work in one of the few locations they operate in. You have to be a pretty hardcore patriot to put up with the things the NSA is doing and still be able to sleep at night.
In summary: it seems that the pool of potential employees should be severely limited. Hence my guess would be that the top talent ends up in the private sector instead of the NSA.