The Google Mafia
Was reading this article about Google’s move into local search and how it’s peaked regulator’s interest and one quote in particular jumped out:
“This is not in the ‘don’t be evil’ bucket,” said one industry source, who like most asked not to be named for fear of repercussions for publicly criticizing Google. “They’re giving preferential treatment to their own content.”
Really? “Asked not to be named for fear of repercussions.” We are talking about a bunch of nerds, aren’t we? But then I thought about it, and I’ve done the same. Self-censored myself for some fear that big bad Google will come knocking, cutting out my knees in the form of PageRank. This is scary.
Hi, I'm 
Hi Noah, I think the problem is not being fearless – on your part. Don’t censor yourself because of fear of reprisal – take the risk, see what happens, start a movement. Those who watched from their windows while people were murdered in the streets may not be the ones we look up to. It’s the ones who went out on the street and tried to do something about it.
Steve
Steve, I generally agree (though the watching murderers metaphor may be a bit overboard). I’ve written fairly critical things of Google in the past: Paid Links, Gifts and the Threat of Lost Pagerank, What is Google’s Motivation? and Google Music: More Evil.
I think we’re seeing the beginning of the end of PageRank as a critical metric for websites. It’s still up there, of course, but with most of the interesting links I visit coming to me through my Twitter and Delicious networks, the actual relevance of PageRank in my day-to-day is starting to wane. I do search the Google on a frequent basis, but mostly as reference material or for very specific things rather than, say, general product research.
I’ve tried switching to Bing a few times with mixed results, it’ll get there eventually.