Apologies, I haven't made myself clear with that idiotic of a snarky remark :) What I meant is that their actions in the past shouldn't be an excuse to their actions today.

The principles behind PageRank are based on unbiased reputation, and provide for a good ranking system (spammers aside). Whatever's thrown on top needs to be carefully considered not to enforce biases towards any group in particular.

> How are they supposed to run a search engine without prioritizing?

Maybe quality of content? If the best info gets buried because they can't afford a cert or don't have a need for one then this hurts the Internet.