Austin Carr at FastCompany has a nice article regarding Goog's "swing and a miss" trying to swat content farms. You can read the article here: http://www.fastcompany.com/1732707/d...farm-pesticide
Basically this lends support to the idea that Goog does pick winners and losers. A company with a $1.5B market cap has a lot more to lose than many smaller ones that Goog ultimately penalized. So just in financial markets we are learning that you can be...

So Goog tried unsuccessfully to tamp down on the content farmers like Demand Media and eHow. They did however get rid of one nuisance in Mahalo. This post by Aaron Wall at SEO Book pretty much sums up the situation http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors
The interesting part about this is that in a weird way Goog needs content on all subjects so that it can offer a full index. Even if that content is low quality it's better than nothing. To avoid the "share cropper"...