I agree with you on some of your points, specifically that all media have their share of misinformation and that much of the online content is derivative of offline publications.

But I disagree with the rest:

People do get paid to produce information: even in this economy, there are paid reporters, analysts, and consultants.

People buy information–not all publications are published for free, and even free publications sell that information for their readers attention, which they in turn sell to advertisers.

There’s more to search technology that return the “best raw material”–and even you suggest that you don’t mean best but most when you argue that search engines should be measured solely based on their breadth of coverage. Google didn’t win the search wars by indexing the most documents; rather, it offered the best relevance ranking of the documents it indexed. You can debate what “best” means for something as subjective as relevance, but users acted on this judgment en masse.

Surely the best search technology is one that helps you find what you are looking for as effectively and efficiently as possible. Google is certainly good enough for a significant subset of people’s information needs, and most people don’t think beyond that subset. Or, if they do, they don’t expect a search engine to address it.

Finally, if “just words” are a waste of time, why bother learning how to read and write? Or if only facts matter, why learn how to think and analyze? There’s more to discussion than catharsis.

People driven vs. algorithms (if one can ever be separated from other) is not the real choice. Our options are limited by the very nature of information available on Web, which is merely a byproduct of media business. No one gets paid for producing correct information or even for genuine effort to do so. Likewise, no one buys this information as anything worthy of investing your time beyond obtaining quick and dirty input into the real (and private) quest for truth.
Even writing this response is probably wast of time as no real value is a stake here – just words.

So it follows that the best search technology is the one that produces the best raw material – not the best answers, which is impossible in principle until Web becomes the place where real values are traded (like stock exchange).

Therefore the real measure of search engine is what I would call a coverage or all inclusiveness of results, more so than focus or selectiveness of any kind. Google gives you simply the best coverage, which is why I use it most.

Jeremy, you’re right that using PageRank as a query-independent relevance factor is a form of people-powered search. But, even in its original form, PageRank was designed to be harder to game than, say, popularity based on number of clicks. And, as PageRank has been gamed through link farms and other forms of spamdexing, Google has made proprietary (and secret) modifications to that original approach.

I do think Gene has a really good point, too. One of the facts that is too often overlooked in all of these social media spaces is that the the independence assumption often doesn’t hold. And without that, you’ve lost the foundational basis for “wisdom of crowds”.

Given the enormous value of placement in unpaid search results, I would expect attacks on any point of vulnerability. Perhaps that’s why Google is so secretive, but I’ve never been a believer in security through obscurity.

p.s. Not trying to single out Google here. Yahoo and Microsoft have the same issues, only at a smaller scale.