Google is pretty much dead and it doesn't even know it. They have produced nothing but high profile flops for some time now and all indications are that pangerank is no longer reliable, they have stemmed e tide a bit with blacklisting but I am pretty sure they are approaching search the wrong way. As the web matures they should focus on ferreting out quality sites, not just boiling the ocean and indexing everything there is to index. A "like button" based search is going to eat their lunch, the question is who is going to get there first.
> A "like button" based search is going to eat their lunch
Only until the content farms build bots capable of liking each other. It's an eternal arms race. Google figures out a property that quality content has (links from other sites, URL matching keywords, "like button" clicks), and it's useful for a while until the content farms figure it out and morph their content to match those rules.
