/deluded paranoia
Here are the academic credentials of key players on the Google search team.
Vice President and Google Fellow - Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley
Director of Product Management, Search - Bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Engineering Director - PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan, undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University
Google Fellow - Undergraduate degree in India from IIT, Roorkee, a MS from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in Computer Science. At Cornell, he studied Information Retrieval with the late Gerard Salton, one of the founders of the field. Has co-authored more than thirty scientific papers and numerous patents.
Matt Cutts - Prior to joining Google in 2000, Matt worked on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He has a master?s degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, and bachelor?s degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/press.html
Keep in mind that those are just the key players. The entire team is made up of people with advanced degrees in fields such as computer science, computer engineering, and math from schools like MIT, Caltech, University Of Texas, Stanford, and other Ivy League caliber institutions who anticipate that there will inevitably always be people trying to 'game their system' regardless of what they publicly disclose and they therefore have absolutely no reason whatsoever to lie or mislead anyone. Especially when they can just re-adjust the system. Everything I've ever heard Matt Cutts say has been 100% on the money.