I think by ‘do no evil’ they really mean ‘do nothing that would drag eyeballs away from google hosted ads’.

Since my exceptional gastronomic experiences in Mexico, I have searched far and wide for comparable food in the US, but have been sorely disappointed.

As for Google, the sooner we all realize it’s overrated as a search engine, the better off all of us (except Google, of course) will be. Google still has some images listed which I took down a year ago. Just how often is that database updated, anyway?

Try La Chalupa in Red Bank; it’s right across from the train station. Real mexican food (it’s where the mexicans in town eat).

Google video is a good example. They transcode the video into the proprietary FLV format, embed it into a SWF ( Flash ) media player, and then address this file with a hash key that’s too long to be linkable in a presentation context. The result is a non-portable, proprietized, media asset that presents less value to the content owner, and larger web community, than the same asset in almost any other storage and delivery context.

For an alternative, and much more community and developer friendly approach see video.yahoo.com and MediaRSS - these actually add value.

prediction: people are going to realize that google isn’t run be ewoks and begin to question whether it’s appropriate to vest so much personal information with a black box.

Yes, this may be Google’s attempt to own some content for a change - it’s very easy to switch search engines, but if Google could own data that the other engines can’t index, they’ll put themselves ahead of the game. Of course, this would also make them look like utter hypocrites, as you point out, by trying to index everyone else’s data for free while keeping their own data under lock and key.

Even if the data is open to the world (and they may be forced to do this if they don’t want to be branded “evil” yet again), they will still seek out an advantage to owning this data in a highly structured form - probably by tying it in to services like Adwords, Google Accounts, Google Wallet and the like. This level of integration would increase switching costs for most users - it’s something that Yahoo has done well, but Google has yet to master..

Slick move.