It seems to me that google is in a weird way the old high school popularity contest recreated on its head. By privileging sites with a great number of inbound links, it makes certain popular sites rise to the top of the pile. While this may produce relevance, a worthy goal, it may be doing so at the cost of privileging more conventional knowledge over more estoretic or revolutionary versions of ideas. So let’s say you have a crazy theory about the universe that noone agrees with. It may mean that noone links to you. Unless we can add something to the search interface which will allow someone to uncover fringe theories, we end up in the situation potentially hindering knowledge progress by foregrounding the popular version of events over those people trying to challenge the common understanding.
To rectify this it would be nice to have something which would be a kind of lowest sensible relevance filter. So, show me something which is related to what I am looking for through on page grammatical/semantic analysis, but from a linking standpoint is a relative orphan. It would also be cool to have meta data being collected from users about whether they agree or disagree with what they are reading, so that I can eventually read news that people agree is decent versus news they might classify as bogus (cough fox, cough), or vice versa.