Google's New algorithm

Google has implemented a new algorithm, so that pages with a higher PageRank get crawled more frequently. The evidence for this is strong, and has developed only over the last few days.

What are the philosophical implications of this new move?

Previously, PageRank was a major determinant of how deeply your site was crawled (particularly if you had a very deep site), and of course it has always been a major determinant of how your pages ranked on Google searches.

Now it is also a determinant of how frequently your pages are crawled. It looks like the highest-ranked pages might get crawled once every other day, or perhaps even more frequently. (The evidence suggests that this is a per-page PageRank, not an overall site home-page PageRank, so that the top, shallow layers of your site will enjoy more frequent crawls than the deeper pages.)

For pages with average-to-low rank, where these pages also contain time-sensitive material, will this new algorithm put them at a serious disadvantage? It will appear to Google searchers that they are constantly stale when compared to higher-ranking sites, when in fact this is a function of Google's new algorithm.

Does this new algorithm increase the "tyranny of the majority" problem that some have already complained about with respect to PageRank? It will make the Washington Post, the new York Times, and CNN happy, but does it also make Google more elitist?

Does this matter to anyone? Should Google try to compensate for this by giving public-sector (.org, .edu, .gov) sites a bump in PageRank? Do they do this already?