flicker - 2:17 am on May 26, 2005 (gmt 0)

Could be. My feeling is that it's likelier that the exclusion of the quality sites that have gone MIA is a mistake and will be fixed eventually, not that it's Google's plan and all the rest of the quality sites on the web will soon join them in oblivion. I'm a big Occam's Razor devotee. But I'll let you know if anything happens to this site or to any of the other authority sites in the field (they all have a gazillion scraper links by now, so they ought to make good test cases).