Out of desperation, Google's gone evil. For all of the shady things that Google had done in the past that people said were evil, nothing approaches the infection of their search service with Google+ rankings. Google had always largely maintained the integrity of their search product which, despite minor adulterations added over the years, was still essentially based on little more than a strict, normative interpretation of the HTTP and HTML standards. By doing so, they maintained the integrity of the company itself. The standards now take a back seat to Google+.

The author is spot on about this. It's evil. In my estimation, it's disrespectful to users. And it therefore creates a huge opportunity for Bing, et al. What remains to be seen is whether, on balance, this degradation of the search service is significant enough to drive away a substantial number of users.