If they were smart enough to buy links off the economist before the economist got outted by DaveN, then they must be smart SEOs in the first place.  Makes you kind of wonder 2 things:
Where else do they guys get their links from (that is the commercial guys)?
How does The Economist get away with selling [...]

So far no, depending on how your website is optimised but if the search pages pass flat links into your product pages then I think removing search result pages in the index is likely to remove product detail pages from the index.  Thats what experiements so far with client websites have shown.  But that this [...]

Favourite mash ups include googlism.com, boardreader.com and other other mash ups using translations.  Pretty cool hey?