What's the likely hood someone at Google actually considered this would happen and went ahead with it anyway? (or was the link a mandatory part of the statement they were told to issue?).
Please, at the very least, give the article a cursory skim before knee-jerk commenting.
The people at Google must have suspected that it would happen. Whether they specifically pointed out that they were going to send huge amounts of traffic to their site or not would be interesting to know.