Article: French National Library to Open Archives to Microsoft Bing

Here's the key part of the announcement:

The [French National Library] is making it easier for Microsoft to link to digitized versions of over a million documents in its archives. In return, Microsoft will make search results from the library more prominent.

No money will change hands as a result of the deal, which is non-exclusive, meaning that Microsoft can give similar prominence to search results from other document archives, and the library can give similar access to other search engines, including Google.

It is very good that material from the French National Library will gain more exposure, although I find it very interesting that the content "more prominent". Search engines do manipulate search results.  I wonder how this will be implemented?  Will items from the collection be automatically at the top of the search results?  Will they just rank higher than normal?  And will all of our search results one day be so manipulated that they will be meaningless?