I'm not sure what the OP is referring to about Picasa, but he is definitely on the mark about Chrome. Maybe you haven't noticed IE9's or FF4's UI; both have taken cues from Chrome's original design (tabs on top, pinning tabs, etc). Chrome has also started a browser arms race in terms of performance. The browser is rapidly acquiring market share; at the current rate of growth, it looks like it will overtake FF in the next year or two (http://www.thechromesource.com/tag/chrome-market-share-2011/).

...guess what's going to happen? You're going to be *the target* to hit for spam. That's the way spam works, volume. Email, Altavista, Google...it doesn't matter what the target it is, as long as it nets you the biggest audience. Additionally, every article I see that complains about Google search spam never uses any good examples.

"Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for 'iPhone 4 case' in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead."

Hmm, I googled iPhone 4 case. 3rd link...shopping results for iPhone 4 cases which has a huge list of different types of cases, places I can get them, local retailer locations, and so on. How is that "utterly useless?"

From the TechCrunch article that reported about streaming search awhile back:

“At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”

The google blog states that they randomly select which computers get used for testing new features like streaming search.