As for the “blind loyalty,” we often confuse disagreement on fundamental principles for blindness.

I don’t really have a problem with a delay of 24-36 hours (as you describe in moving your site). I don’t know what this move entailed, but my own experience with new sites is a great deal longer delay which does bother me very much.

As someone who interacts with a variety of Google programs, I do have a problem with Google’s opacity (although I love much of Google’s technology and appreciate a great deal about the company). I’d guess this is the only publicly traded US corporation that inspires the kind of blind loyalty and trust that your comments indicate.

1) The PageRank’s failure is not the result of Google, but the result of the gaming of the system that is now endemic to the destruction of the commons. Unfortunately, this seems to be growing as fast as online usage does, if not faster. Casual statistics from a friend at one of the top 3 backbone providers says that nearly 1/4 of traffic is now spamish. Certainly my experience is that 90%+ of email is now spam. Advanced algorithms to defeat it have more and more variables as the opponent becomes more skilled. There is no reason to believe this will end without radical sociopolitical and legal changes, or that the algorithm will become simpler in any near term.

2) The delay is largely a result of the gaming of the system. This is one way to delay the visibility of things that are being gamed. In fact, I would expect it to be a non-deterministic behavior pattern, rather than some constant. As an example, the move of my web site showed up in Google somewhere between 24 and 36 hours after happening. This involved moving a lot of URLs. This is an acceptable delay. While we might want instant gratification, it is unlikely to occur given the architectural model in use and the necessity in addressing the systemic behavioral problems.

3) Yahoo used to be the predominant way, then Alta Vista, and now Google. I have no doubt that one day it will be someone else. If I am to sweat the control of public discourse, the airwaves of television and radio are orders of magnitude more dominant than Google. Alas, those of us in the industry often forget our perspective place in the world.

4) No, heavy handed is heavy handed. The reasoning and behavior are important. I distrust Microsoft, but I don’t believe for 1 minute that their have any obligation to release their source code or algorithms to the public, or that the forcing of such an action is anything but theft of property. APIs are different, and Microsoft has a mixed history of those. Google is moving towards more flexibility with APIs and such, and I think this demonstrates a lot of their flexibility and cooperativeness.

5) If I had a revolutionary idea in search, I would not hand it over to Google for free. Also, by viewing their designs, unless they were released with zero restrictions (a fantasy world), it would contaminate your own IP and thereby make ownership a more difficult thing to determine.

In the end, I’ve yet to see a real argument FOR Google releasing it, from THEIR perspective. You may want it, but as with my own opinions, who cares? Does it serve Google’s goals (do no evil, profit, etc)? I can see no indication that it does.

The primary thing you said I said that I didn’t (and that in fact I don’t believe) is that everything should be open. I do not believe this, and never said I did. Some things should, and some things shouldn’t—although I think Linux is a case in point of something that has clearly benefited from being open.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to see both sides of an issue. The reason for the “polarity” of my position is, of course, I see the problems with any kind of disclosure of PageRank. Bearing in mind these problems, and the unlikeliness of it ever being disclosed, here are the reasons I think at least some more community discourse regarding the precise nature of PageRank would be helpful:

(1) PageRank, based on my searches, is not working as well as it used to. My impression is that the rate of deterioration is increasing. So it is not the case of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Rather, it is this isn’t working, and Google is playing catchup to try to make it work, kludging together something with 100 variables (!). The elegant simplicity of the PageRank concept has clearly been lost.

(2) The time delay built into newer iterations of the Google model really bugs me. I like my information fresh! And as someone who is frequently putting up web sites, I like to be able to get them picked up fast without resorting to chicanery myself.

(3) In fact, Google is the predominant way people find information on the web. Anyone who thinks this is not very mportant to people, politics, and life is naive. And, Google itself is more of a community effort than may be apparent. Case in point: Google uses the community-run Open Directory Project for major taxonomic information.

(4) It’s bad when Microsoft is heavy-handed and secretive, but OK when Google is? Come on, Googlers may be the good guys, but let’s hold them to the same standards as everyone else.

(5) No, I do not believe Google has hired all the smart people with something to contribute to search. What baloney! Sometimes the best ideas in fact do come from outside the box.

But is it UI we’re talking about here? As far as I know, UI (the area in which non-Firefox open source fares most poorly) and a data-crunching algorithm are unrelated.