As interesting as this may seem - take it with a grain of salt. One very effective way of biasing these surveys are to run them a number of times - if there is any significant variance in the results - you can always ignore the studies that didn't work out well, and publicize the one that does.

Far better for a third-party to commission these studies and do them once, and see what the results are.

Actually this wouldn't surprise me for some searches. When searching for say "new york hotels" I often find Google's attempts at "trying to help" to be annoying.

I don't want to see the main search results dedicated to showing an arbitrary selection of local new york hotels. I just want the links to sites like Expedia etc who will show me ALL the hotels.