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So Google is undercutting the blackout by suppressing the reality of sites' content and pretending the web is normal today? And webmasters are cheering it because they don't actually want to black out, they just want a slacktivist PR hit?

And a subversive angle: imagine if SOPA passes and Google gets a deindex order, and they "slow their crawler" during the deindexing operation.

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I see your point, but I think it is mainly because they don't want Wikipedia/etc to be de-indexed and not be #1 hit for EVERYTHING anymore. This protest is exactly that, a protest, a mere emulation of what could happen.

It's not about pretending the web is normal, its about ensuring that everything is back to normal tomorrow.

Wikipedia won't be deindexed as their blackout page is a javascript-generated layer over the content. Smaller sites with simpler blackout-ing schemes (e.g. replace their normal content with SOPA content) would be far more at risk, Wikipedia isn't.

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