Curiously, a search on Virgin Radio for XFM unearths the rather peculiar discovery that XFM is using Virgin Radio’s social networking to promote its own station! Cheeky…

Meanwhile, “Virgin Radio recommends” also does appear in certain searches, like frequencies - mostly because the team monitored the search queries. (I did that one.)

I note that the Virgin Radio search has been significantly overhauled recently; with a ton of context-sensitive options. Good thing.

I’ve expanded a bit on how it worked here -
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2007/11/bbci_search_impartiality.php

It was a feature with unintended consequences, rather than either being a ‘glitch’ or a deliberate policy to exterminate competition from the web search listings.