I was at the Google Instant Launch and Sergey Brin answered my question.<p>"Less than 1% of the users generate content that is consumed by the rest of the 99%. Google does an extremely good job of serving this 99% with the content already generated. What is Google doing to help with changing this ration to more like 5% of the people generating content?" He replied that "Ad sense was the first product that helped with increasing content generation as more people saw that their content can be monitized. Similarly we have Blogger and a bunch of publishing tools."I replied back " What about with local & recommendations where Yelp and Quora etc are doing a great job. Google can use its reach to collect more data in local. So when some one is browsing a map for restaurants they can also quickly add ratings and stars for a few restaurants." He said " We partner with other people in areas where they are good. We do recommendations but it's buried. You will see a lot of innovation from us in local soon."