While big commercial labs may be dying, basic science is not going to die. Basic science will move to universities with big endowments (see Harvard) that have no profit-motive (apart from their endowment managers).

This result was likely precipitated 20 years ago by the Bayh-Dole Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act , which brought about the ease of commercialization of university inventions and the rise of "tech transfer offices" within such institutions.

This is an opportunity for great American universities (widely regarded around the world as the top in research) to become even stronger. Having basic science tied up in the back rooms of corporate laboratories is no way to go about advancing human scientific progress. As universities move toward making all their professors' research available freely online, this will in fact be quite the boon to basic science (in America and elsewhere). See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html

The Register article complains solely because a search for "second superpower" now links primarily to an article on a Harvard weblog about something increasingly similar to the term they preferred ("second superpower" being those global antiwar protestors).

What does this mean? Google's relevance works -- I saw links to the Harvard article on almost every major weblog I read--it's a popular concept, and google reflects that.

Google is not an encyclopedia, nor is it a movement organizer. Google categorizes information based on some perceived level of web popularity. I think its doing its job.