Does collective intelligence have limits?

A tip of the hat to Andrew Orlowski of the Register for connecting some important dots others did not in his piece "Google cranks up the consensus machine."

• Andrew noted the exceptionally important precursor that Google's Marissa Meyer indicated in a Techcrunch interview that, going forward, Google would cross it's neutral search line and begin editing search results produced by its currently human-intervention-free algorithm.

This is a big deal because Google has long preached that much of the value and relevance of Google's searches is that the search algorithm is fully automated and thus objective and not biased by human input.

Andrew is wise to ask what standards Google will employ in deciding which search results to effectively censor and which search results to vault to the top of the first page? And will they share them with us or will they be opaque like the advertising Quality variable? 

• It is important to know what the standards will be because this is a very slippery slope with far reaching implications.

It will also be interesting to see if the guardians of free speech on the Internet also connect the dots that the heretofore "neutral" barrier is being breached for the Internet's dominant gateway to the world's information.

Lots to think about -- if this is indeed a paradigm shift for the Web 2.0 movement.

When does collective intelligence become group think or mob justice and thus requires individual intervention to overturn it? Is the crowd not always wise? Isn't that Web 2.0 heresy? 

We shall see if this truly important issue gets debated on the Internet...