Why did interflora get kicked off Google search rankings?

Here is a good question and answer from SXSW 2013 regarding why Interflora got kicked off the Google search ranking in advance of mothers day;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7nVHslGyw

Question from David de Niese: UK there was a case regarding Interflora http://www.interflora.co.uk, where Google kicked Interflora off the search index, Interflora were probably responsible for that in some way as well, no doubt. But ultimately Matt was responsible for every mother in the UK not getting flowers for mothers day this year. What it does proof is that the algorithms that you use have a large material impact on every company in the world. How long do you think the work that you guys do will remain unregulated? 

Answer from Matt Cutts from Google: How long do I think the work we do will remain unregulated? That's an interesting question; I'm just a web spam guy, I'm not a lawyer, so let me prefix it with that. I've actually had the enjoyment of talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, right, for FTC and EC. And so far that's gone relatively well. From our perspectives we try to make sure we run the search engine, we run google, just like you guys would run the search engine, like you would run Google if you were in charge. And so we have pretty clear guidelines like don't cloak, don't do sneaky javascript redirects, don't make doorways, don't buy links that pass page rank cos those violate FTC guidelines and the UK fair-trade guidelines and all that stuff. 

We force that on both small and large companies. But you don't always here about it because when we take action on large companies, we're not as more likely to talk about that as we don't always talk about it when we take action against a small company. So last week for example we and earlier this week we took action on 98,000 sites, that were all part of a link network. We don't feel the need to call those sites out, right. And we're probably not going to say this site did badly, this site didn't do badly.

But I'm actually kind of heartened that when people like the FTC come in, and look through 9 million documents then about how Google works, you know there was a great article by Tim Woo who was at the FTC and said the regulators were doing their job, they looked at what was going on, and apparently didn't find anything worth pursuing. For working at Google for 13 years I think we try to do a pretty principle job. So you know whether it's a big or small company, whether it's a site that sells flowers, or whether it's a mom or pop, we try an enforce our guidelines consistently.