I think people fail to understand how separate teams work inside Google. In 2007 this would probably have been done by the team working on consumer products like Google Sites. A deal of this size would have been led by an eng director and a PM from those teams. These guys are quite separate from search quality and likely wouldn't even interact much or at all unless they were previously acquainted. Same goes for ads - the AdSense team (of which I was a part) wouldn't really ever have input on any search quality decisions and vice versa. The execs would not make some top down dictat for us to collude or anything. It just wasn't really done.
