Everyone is like: haha that is funny, or evil, but think about it for a second<p>Consider large financial groups. Often they have both investment banking and wealth management divisions. Let's say IB is a primary dealmaker for country's oil industry. Why would WM division hire an analyst covering oil industry, combing through the public sources? They already have insider knowledge of the industry!<p>Oh wait...<p>Except that it is expressly illegal and finance is required by law to maintain "glass wall" between certain divisions and control the flow of information.<p>It is quite believable that Google would want to avoid accusations of unfair competition, self-regulate, and hire an SEO person for one of their non-search related businesses, like Nest or broadband, or carpool service, and maintain some degree of plausible deniability that it does not use insider information to compete with other non-search-related companies.