I was planning on writing this afternoon about Broadcom's new patent suit against Qualcomm. Regardless of the merits, it looks like a good corporate strategy, creating uncertainty about a market opponent just as you're entering their space.

But in researching the story I learned something new about Google that may distress you. And that's a better blog item than the one I started with.

It used to be the case that when you wanted to learn about a company and its stock you could input the ticker symbol at Google.com, come up with a set of pages from various financial sites, and then click a button to "remove the frame" and link to the page you wanted. It's a neat feature. Just enter BRCM (Broadcom's ticker symbol) at Google.Com.

I've done this for months, but there was a surprise today. Now there's an intermediate step, a large listing carrying a daily stock chart and data. If you're just looking for the basics of today's trading you need go no further. But click on the link and see what happens anyway.

Now you get the four listings, as before. But the box which removes frames from around Yahoo, Fool.Com, MSN MoneyCenter and eTrade Clearstation results is gone. It looks, on the surface, as though Google is wrapping its own brand around others' content (if you ignore the fact that you could have gotten basic data from the initial search, no link needed).

Now for those who wish to link to in-depth content, rather than Google, all is not lost. Firefox users can right-click within the frame, highlight this frame, then roll over to show only this frame and voila -- you have the frame's URL. IE users must right-click, choose Properties, then cut-and-paste the URL found in this box at the top of the page in order to see it.

Both methods are a little kludgy. The IE method is kludgier. And it must also be acknowledged that Google has not (so far) placed advertising on the outside of the frame.

A search using the same ticker symbol methodology at Yahoo, meanwhile, delivers you only Yahoo data on the first four links. The same search at MSN Search offers almost nothing useful, just a radio-controlled flying club whose dot-com has the ticker symbol.

But here is the bottom line. As with Google News, and as with blogs, Google is making a human choice, not a machine choice here. And in this case it's a new choice. The dodge "this is all done by computer" is looking less-and-less tenable.

Google has also made an editorial choice to drop Marketwatch from its offerings on raw stock data, going instead with eTrade ClearStation. This is important to note because eTrade is a trading site, not a news site, and other online brokers, like Schwab, carry similar pages of data. It could be that, over the next months, vendor pages will replace news pages across all these tabs. There would be great value to them in that.

So the new move hints at what may become a new aggressiveness from Google on choosing links, and on maintaining its brand after a search, one old-time users may find very distressing.

First do no harm indeed.