"Searching for “most amazing woman ever” on Bing will give you MetaFilter’s helpful “Who is the most amazing woman who ever lived” as the third result. (Answers, by the way, included British spy and French Resistance leader Nancy Wake, world’s first programmer Ada Lovelace, slave rescuer and activist Harriet Tubman, and Chinese pirate Ching Shih.) Google puts it at the bottom of the second page of results, in 19th place. Google’s top result? A list of “the 100 most beautiful women ever.” "

That made me wonder whether Google has shifted its products from being the kind of thing that their own employee corps would enjoy to things for the general public. I personally f.i. enjoyed the from: to: keywords in Google Maps search. That feature disappeared and probably the majority of users wouldn't use those anyway. Personally I scorn at a search result of the '100 most beautiful women'. But in the large population it will probably lead to a much higher click through. So I wonder if Google Search was oriented towards the smart crowd niche and that they changed focus towards the common and the populous. To put it differently: a shift from an emphasis in information as high value search result towards including entertainment, gossip etc. High brow to low brow.