TechCrunch’s Erik Schonfeld has a post titled “With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content” which has a graphic that suggests, along with a not subtle claim in the title, that Google is interested in linking to its own content.
Well, Schonfeld continues to say that Google design principles included getting out of the way of the user experience. Which you can decide by reading their posted principles.
I think they simply post the material that is most searched for, such as in the posted search on TechCrunch which is an attempt to find information on a chocolate shop. The one used in the Google presentation. Apparently TechCrunch discovered that they are forcing a delinking of the Places index with robots.txt, which directs certain functions on a website. But really, the harm isn’t in that it’s being indexed. The indexing isn’t going to do anything other than post results based on popularity, and that popularity is based on the Google math, and traffic profile for the site, links, and searches via Google.
Schonfeld also suggests that if it continues to interlink, you’ll see Google end up like Yahoo. And really, I think Google is going to go that route anyway. People want a fast, robust, and qualified search result, and users are part of the filtering process [without gaming it, you'll get great results, but we know that humans can't resist the urge to taint results... be it a vote, a game, or a search result.] which leads to better final results. We are, afterall, the consumers.
Still, I don’t know how much of a concern this is. Only a few people noticed out of all of the users of Google. Myself being one of them, I wondered why so many Google projects were wedged into my results over the last several weeks. I know that the Maps solution popped up some time ago, and then Pages which I think is a somewhat slack attempt at building a Facebook/MySpace/Classmates solution but without any critical mass to make it a success.