Sure, read the last few paragraphs of this Journal article. The reporter is up front about her source: "Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""
""In September, Gabriel Weinberg, founder and chief executive of tiny Duck Duck Go Inc., which markets itself as a privacy-protecting search engine, stumbled across the "you recently searched for" phenomenon in a study he conducted of Google's personalization efforts. Mr. Weinberg, whose site is based in Paoli, Pa., asked 131 of its users to search Google for several keywords at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 2: "Obama," "abortion" and "gun control." His testers received a wide variety of different results that appeared to be personalized by location and other factors.
Mr. Weinberg also noticed that some testers received results labeled "you recently searched for Obama," and discovered that he couldn't replicate the same label when searching for Romney. Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""
There's no shame in running an interesting story that's brought to your attention by someone with vested interests.
For example, notorious fraudster Barry Minkow dug up a list of all the executives in publicly traded corporations who lied about their college degrees and gave that information to the WSJ after short-selling the companies, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652836844922165.html.
Win-win -- the Journal got an important news tip, and he made some money on the bounce.
Unfortunately for Minkow, he couldn't resist going after just bad companies and ended up in prison for defrauding a home-building company, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190346110457646....