There have been a couple of interesting follow up post to this.

SEO by the Sea on what's going on - answer: entities - www.seobythesea.com/?p=4179

Search Engine Land waiting for a response from Google's press office - searchengineland.com/google-search-results-dominated-by-one-domain-49025

Maybe it's a good idea says Coast Digital - www.coastdigital.co.uk/blog/2010/08/19/google-algorithm/

What you are seeing is a continued rollout of what Google announced long ago. SEOBook published a post in February 2009 with the now famous CEO Internet Cesspool quote announcing their intention to favor Big Brands to "clean up" the Internet.

In May of this year their MayDay Update moved sites like eBay, Amazon, Target, etc. above small businesses for searches they never competed on before, causing a 20-35% drop in traffic and sales for small ecommerce sites that did not heed the many warnings of what was coming.

This is only the beginning. Expect Big Brands to dominate the serps for more and more primary keyword phrases and long tail searches. Watch major Social Media sites favor Big Brands too such as the move made by Facebook to exclude small businesses.

The fight over Net Neutrality and moves by G and Verizon to control whose sites load online and especially in mobile devices and whose don't. That is part of this too.

We have a choice to make: support INDEPENDENT solutions and small online and local businesses and stop the economic collapse the focus on cheap consumer goods has created or not. It is up to each of us to decide what kind of life we want to have.

I totally agree with you. A few big boys are crowding out the play ground and taking over. Hard to win in a crooked card game. Google smells like mafia to me.