You are very correct about a Google gaining business. They will be looked at to see what they are doing in the future. Some companies ventures work, and some do not. Then other companies have the Midas touch: (everything they touch turns to gold).

Well Google should reveal itself to either have successful plans worked out or not within the next few years. I can't see their current stranglehold on AdSense and Page Rankings continuing for much longer without some sort of outcry from the community that depends on internet revenue.

I actually never paid attention to page ranking. Maybe because I only have 2 little blogs, and the traffic I get are from people that are interested, and from links on other blogs. I guess I would need to do more marketing and see if something happened.

That really is the best way to get your traffic higher naturally though. The same people who are constantly looking for new ways to exploit PageRank are the ones who end up getting screwed over by Google in the end regardless.