Before I even start, I want to say this is high on the speculation meter. A single post at WebmasterWorld said he heard via an investor, Bill Burnham, that Google is changing their policies for traffic partners. The specific policy they are changing, as said in the thread, is that Google is considering changing their policies to prevent search traffic partners from changing users’ home page & default search settings.

That means, if you are a partner with Google, such as Dell, and you want to change the users’ home page or default search settings when they install something (I guess, it is not clear) then Google will consider this a violation of their new policy?

Let me quote the whole post:

Do you think this is true? Clearly this had an impact on one of their partner’s stock. But what is really going on here?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.