> I'll cry when its gone, but I don't think anyone should feel entitled to a free service. But... it's not 'free' so much as 'doesn't cost cash'. There's plen

> I'll cry when its gone, but I don't think anyone should feel entitled to a free service. But... it's not 'free' so much as 'doesn't cost cash'. There's plenty of cost in adopting a tool like that, an integrating it in to your life. And... it's not like Google was getting 0 in return - the usage data they could have collected (and probably were to some degree) was quite high, and they pretty much exist to collect usage behaviour and use algorithms to make money from that data. But they chose not to. Instead of continuing to foster the notion of people writing content on their own blogs, and simply giving people a tool to search it (ala google search), taking away that tool and pushing people to write that content directly in g+ gives them a number of advantages over any other search service that wants to even consider trying to come close to comprehensive search. this is AOL walled garden 3.0.