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.