d-null

the recent article on ice.com being a company that spends a million dollars on google adwords advertising made me wonder about search engine rankings and the ramifications it has on traffic etc

I googled the word 'ice', expecting to find a bunch of pages on frozen water etc etc, but lo and behold, ice.com is right at the very top..... maybe they are extremely optimized and all the right links pushed them so high (it is a jewelry company, by the way, and seems to have nothing to do with ice other than the name which maybe shows up twice on the front page)

so it got me wondering, is google slanting the seo optimization game heavily in favor of those that are spending big $$ on advertising with them, and could this get even more pervasive in the near or distant future to where nearly overnight the whole seo optimization and many websites' business model could become obsolete? What if someday soon google subtly decided to make it so the top 10 pages of results for many keywords were populated with companies with 7 figure advertising budgets?

I may be completely wrong and missing something here, so anyone that can comment or correct my understanding please do.