Google's politically biased search term results?

Is Google politically biased in terms of what search terms it is willing to clean up? This article in Politico shows that Google is less than helpful to Rick Santorum (note that this also shows how the search rankings can be played by others). An unnamed Computer Science friend of mine writes:

The google spokesman is a little disingenuous, but parsed words carefully. My sense from interaction on the inside is that google has jiggered page rank to repair similar issues for officials or candidates on the left. Likely a little nexis searching (or even with google) could get news reports about other googlebombing efforts, and then measure informally how long were there effects. In other cases, a gamed page rank from this sort of thing last a day or few. In Santorum's case, it is persistent and I see he has his own link on Wikipedia's page for "smear campaign." Google can adjust page rank and they do it all the time.

Here is a discussion about Google not answering questions about their search engine.

Even after proclaiming, "I love Google," Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) criticized Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt for being dodgy on the company's placement of its own services in Google search results.

Franken's remarks followed an earlier exchange between Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Schmidt, as Lee sought to understand the company's handling of searches in which Google services don't rank first on the results page.

That led Lee to reveal a massive chart, which he said proved Google had "cooked" the system to allow its algorithm to always serve up Google sites earlier than competitors in search results.

But later, Franken said Schmidt never fully answered Lee's question, and then lit into Schmidt for not knowing more information.

"That seemed like a pretty fuzzy answer to me coming from the chairman. If you don’t know, who does?" Franken said. . . .