he technical definition of "do no evil" was that google search would not promote any single entity based on who they are, rather they would let algorithms and data govern the core ranking
Really? Source? (BTW it's "Dont BE evil" not "Do no evil")
Why should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr
Who said it would be?
What search+ does it that it will (possibly) include pictures from Picasa that are not public on the web, but that are owned by or shared with you in your search results.
I'm sure that relevant public photos from flickr will still be ranked and included as appropriate. But I'm guessing that Flickr/Facebook/SmugMug/etc (rightly!) will not be sharing any privately shared photos with Google's web-crawler. So Google can't put those in search results. With photos in Picasa/Google+ we know which ones you are allowed to see and can maintain privacy.
Well! Google is a search engine. So if I search for my name, why should the google plus profile show up first, above the facebook or linkedin profile which probably has a way higher relevance score. Just because you decide to add a widget to detect a name and show the google plus profile as the first result, that to me is hacking the search ranking. From the blog-post, say if you search for music, it might bring up the gplus profile of a famous musician(not even in your circle or friends). Why should it bring the gplus page rather than the myspace page for that musician(which might have a way higher relevance)? That page is public, why don't you show that as the representative page for that piece of information rather than the self-promoted gplus page. It's ok to promote one's own product, all it means is that google search ranking now has a big if-then-else. If google-product, show at top, else push down :p
I guess, my point is that when I come to google and enter a search term, I expect to see all the public information ranked by relevance. Just because you have a different UI treatment for the personalized results doesn't mean that they should get the preferential treatment. When I search for Britney Spears, the google plus, facebook, myspace.. pages for the artist should have equal probability of appearing in that widget/in the search-suggestions(which currently only shows gplus). Let the pagerank/other ranking factors govern which page shows there, don't just hard-code it to be the google-plus page. People are used to google search being impartial and showing the best out of all available information. You can't just show a google plus result at the top and say oh but its in the personalized results widget and not part of the web-ranking.
Really? Source? (BTW it's "Dont BE evil" not "Do no evil")
Why should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr
Who said it would be?
What search+ does it that it will (possibly) include pictures from Picasa that are not public on the web, but that are owned by or shared with you in your search results.
I'm sure that relevant public photos from flickr will still be ranked and included as appropriate. But I'm guessing that Flickr/Facebook/SmugMug/etc (rightly!) will not be sharing any privately shared photos with Google's web-crawler. So Google can't put those in search results. With photos in Picasa/Google+ we know which ones you are allowed to see and can maintain privacy.